Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 10/7/22 William Astore: There’s Something Rotten in the US Military

Episode Date: October 11, 2022

Scott talks with William Astore about an article he penned recently in TomDispatch about the inner rot plaguing today’s U.S. military. Astore, who served as a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, has observed an existential flaw that threatens the military from within — lies are rewarded while truthtellers are punished. In this interview, he and Scott take a step back and examine how this sprawling government bureaucracy has hijacked the noble instinct to protect one's community and used it to wage unjust wars of choice.  Discussed on the show: “Integrity Optional” (TomDispatch) We Meant Well by Peter Van Buren The Fog of War William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and history professor. He is a contributing writer at Antiwar.com and TomDispatch.com. Read all of his work at his website, BracingViews.com. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; and Thc Hemp Spot. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton.4 you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys introducing william astore regular writer over there at tomdispatch dot com which means we rerun everything he writes there at antiwar dot com as well he's a retired

Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Air Force and Professor of History and Senior Fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network. And his personal blog is called the Bracing Views. That's at bracingviews.com. Welcome back to the show. How are you doing, Bill? Hi, Scott. I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on again. Yeah, it's great to talk to you again. It's been a while. I really like this article. And unfortunately, now I clicked off the paragraph I wanted to, I had highlighted. But I know what it said. It was, well, the article is called Integrity Optional, Lies and Dishonored Plague America's War Machine.

And maybe this isn't exactly the jumping off point because it's from the middle of the article, not the very beginning. But you say you kind of got caught up in this very narrow, quantifiable view of military progress in a way that later when you snapped out of it, you really came to realize how blind. sort of the whole institution is set to be about everything and dishonor and corruption even aside they just sort of their metrics right as rumsfeld called them are kind of always wrong they do nothing but ask the wrong question and don't really understand even what they should be looking at is that basically where you're going with that yeah yeah well as i said in the article uh you know if if wars could be won by spin, the American military would be undefeated since World War II. Yeah, David Petraeus would be the greatest of us all, right?

Yeah, Petraeus. Well, as you know, he was always so careful to say that his metrics, they were always fragile and reversible, which doesn't sound like any kind of real progress in war. if the enemy can just reverse whatever state that, you know, the surge that you supposedly won. And that occurred, as you know, in Iraq, Afghanistan. I mean, the military was always lying to itself, and as well as lying to the American people. And it comes back to the idea, as you know from my article, it's deeply ironic that my service, the Air Force, The fundamental core value is integrity first.

And I can't count the number of times I was reminded at the Air Force Academy that lying, cheating, stealing, and other dishonorable activity was not to be tolerated. And yet, when you get into the upper ranks of the military, you have all kinds of lying and cheating and stealing, all justified in the name of some elusive. victory. You know, usually justified also by being a loyal company man or a loyal company woman. You know, you're loyal to your superiors. You want to be loyal to the people around you. And so everyone just lies about progress in war. And as you know, Scott, this has been proven by the Pentagon Papers. It was proven by the Afghan war papers. You know, the military says one thing in public. And then while privately saying, well, this war isn't really going so well, but they're not going to share that with the American people until the war calamitously comes to an end.

Yeah. Well, and so that's interesting even in the get-go, right, that in no other real walk of life other than, I guess, you know, raising kiddos, do you really have to tell people all the time? You don't cheat, you don't steal, you don't lie. you have to have honor and respect for other people. Everybody already knows that. Why don't I got to yell that at my guys every day in their face

and make them chant it while they march around or whatever? And then, oh, because the answer is, one, it's a government program, so it's shot through with all the economics of bureaucracy, which means no accountability for anyone ever, and that's kind of the agreement between everyone, as everyone will be allowed to get away with everything. And then beyond that, the profession is destroying human beings, blowing them to little pieces. And it's not really an honorable thing.

Like, you know, they raise us all to believe that, you know, if you join the army, one day you might fight the Wehrmock out in the field. In other words, you'd be taken on a bunch of German servant Hitler who really deserve it. And you won't have to think twice about it. Never mind, a lot of guys who went to World War II and came back had a pretty hard time. And a lot of people died over there. But the idea is, no, no, no, it'll be Olive Green versus Nazi gray, and we'll kick their ass in the name of freedom and democracy and what Jesus would have had us do, and it'll be fine.

But then none of our wars have looked like that since World War II. And even World War II didn't really look like that if you zoom out and look at the Air Wars and stuff. Right. But anyway, and that's really part of it, right? Like as Ron Paul said, he goes, you know, you wonder why these guys commit suicide? We're asking them to, we, he was a congressman, even though he's against stuff. We're, we're asking them to engage in what's essentially psychopathic behavior, which we're only supposed to ever ask somebody to do that in absolute necessity to protect the lives and liberty of the people of our country.

Not to go around, you know, figuring out ways to deploy this thing. But in other words, it just is rotten from the head all the way down, right? Yeah. That is, you know, that is, when you think about military service, and I know a lot of people, you know, people who are critical of military, and I guess I'm critical of the military in my own way, having, even though I served in it for 20 years, you are asking young men and women to kill in the name of country. And that's a, you know, that's a big ask for anyone. And if you think about, when you think about the idea that you're actually asking them to kill for what is essentially a dishonorable task. And if you're asking them to kill in the cause of life, then you really do have a severe moral injury. And that's what a lot of our troops are suffering from.

It's something that, you know, Matthew Ho speaks eloquently about in the book that Andy Batesvich and Danny Schurston put together on dissent in the U.S. military. And I'm sure you know Matthew Ho is running for the Senate and the Green Party in North Carolina. And, you know, he's one of those honorable guys, the former Marine, who joined the State Department, but then resigned in protest. when he realized in 2009 that our Afghan war policy was going nowhere. And yet, you know, even though you had honest people like Matthew Ho, who really a stand-up guy, you know, that war persisted for another 12 years. As the U.S. military kept saying, oh, yes, we're making progress. We're making progress.

Each time, you know, we cycle through 17 or 18 different generals there, and they all said the same thing. and ultimately, you know, we left in chaos and disgrace. Yeah, and in fact, I mean, people go back and look at that history. He wasn't just blowing the whistle. He was given Obama an out to not escalate and do the surge. And all Obama had to say was, listen, we have this brave, heroic, decorated Marine Corps captain from Iraq War II, which he was a hero in Iraq War II, not for killing people, but for,

for saving the lives of guys who'd driven off a bridge into the river. And he jumped into the river and saved their lives was why he was a decorated Marine Corps captain from Iraq War II. And then here he is a State Department whistleblower saying, hey, the reality is this is not going to take. We should not be doing this. And then he's got the ambassador, Eichenberry, who was formerly a general in charge of that war,

saying, I got this guy's, back. He's right. And he didn't stand up for him as well as he could have, but it was enough for Obama to invoke. And he could have just given a big speech and said, I beat McCain because people wanted me, not McCain, to make this decision. And that's it. And he could have stood on Matthew Ho's shoulders there, or, you know, stood by him and made the right call and would have had his argument. And that was why Ho did it. He was blowing that whistle the summer of 2009. And Obama turned around and did it anyway. And then he had three years later, Danny Davis comes out and goes, yep,

who was right, here we are three years later, probably another 100,000 people killed, and what do we have to show for it? Nothing. Right, right. And that's the problem. Another guy was Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling, who wrote that article,

that famous article in 2007, about a failure of generalship, where he said, the famous line being that, you know, A private who loses his rifle suffers more than a general who loses his war. And what happens is the system doesn't reward people like Danny Davis or Matthew Ho or Paul Yingling. Instead, the system gets rid of the truth tellers. Or it forces them into retirement or what have you.

You find that your career path is cut off, you know, when you speak the truth. Another guy that I know that you know, he was with the State Department, I think, was Peter Van Buren. And he wrote, you know, he wrote about the Iraq War and showed that so much of the reconstruction there was a sham. And he was punished as well. He was pursued by, you know, Hillary Clinton and forced into. retirement or for his book, you know, we meant well, which is another great book where he where, again, he had the audacity to tell the truth to the American people. Instead of being celebrated for that and respected for that, you know, he's punished for that. And that's exactly

what's wrong with the system. You know, not only do we have people who are lying, but, but the liars tend to be the ones who get promoted to, to higher rank. And, and, you know, and, you know, the truth tellers are the ones who are demoted and punished. And that's why, that's why you don't, that's why integrity is most certainly optional. Yeah. Well, it seems like the incentives are all messed up. You know, I know a funny story, which I won't tell the funniest part of it, because I'll get us both in trouble. But I know a guy who got himself and his buddy thrown out of the army under 1980s

rules, or sorry, thrown out of the Navy. And it was because he realized that everybody. who failed the test to get a higher rank that six months later when they took the test again everybody got a 10 point bonus to make when they took it the second time to make sure that they passed and he goes oh I get it this is the most absolutely

inane and corrupt and ridiculously and incompetently run organization in the world for a reason and I want out and so I can't tell you the funny part but even that part's funny that that he just looked right sat that and said, no wonder the guys above me are complete incompetence. They've just been here longer, and that's how eventually they make it up there. But then, so, and I know it's like that

for, there's all kinds of just a million anecdotes from all the wars where, especially the officers, they're getting their ticket punched. I've been to Iraq. I've been to Afghanistan. Now, I get a better job when I get home, this kind of crap. It's all has, it's like public choice theory, right has from the highest level down to the uh you know the um captains and lieutenants and whatever that it's all about what's good for them and not about what's good for you know anybody's interest if you zoom out and look at it you know in terms of the nations involved right and and that's that's what i see is you know i i still i still sort even though i'm retired i've been retired for uh je 17 years now i still sort of

think of myself as a, you know, a military officer. And what I see as a problem is, it's like, you know, people think of the strength of the U.S. military is based upon, you know, like an $850 billion budget and all these weapons. But the strength of any military is based on, it really is based on honor and integrity and truthfulness. And it doesn't matter how much money you spend. If you're sending your military off on wars that are based on lies, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter the amount of weapons that, you know, or money that you throw. You're going to lose, and you're not just going to lose the wars, but you're basically losing

your country. You're losing your democracy. And that's why, you know, I have that anecdote. at the end, or that saying from Goethe, where it says that, you know, if your military loses its honor, it is, it has lost much of its ability to, you know, to be a military. And I think that's where we're at. Yeah. Well, I mean, and that makes sense, too, right?

It's like the IDF constantly just acting as a military martial law police force over Palisps. Palestinian civilians, if they ever get in a real fight with anything like a peer competitor, they might have a real problem. Our guys have been patrolling Pashtuns down in the Helmand province, getting shot up pretty bad too, but, you know, essentially fighting people who got nothing but landmines and AK-47s. And so, you know, Lord knows what would happen to them if they actually had to do maneuver warfare. you know, I'm sure that they're as overconfident as ever, you know, when it would come, you know, if it came to interstate conflict. And then, yeah, it makes sense, right?

That when everything's corrupt, top to bottom, inside the thing, all the interests are conflicted inside the organization itself, that, yeah, when it comes to a fight, nobody knows how to do their job, right? Because they're all doing a different job, serving themselves. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, there was a great article a few years ago, I think, was in the Atlantic about how, you know, in World War II, there were a lot of colonels and generals who ended up being fired because they didn't perform. And our military in World War II led by Marshall, and people like Marshall and Eisenhower, you know, they were generals who insisted on results. And it was quite obvious, you know, the generals who weren't up to snuff or the admiralts as well, because they were being put to the test by the Vermark and the Imperial Japanese Navy. And so there was accountability in World War II. You know, you got rid of the generals who couldn't hack it.

But now there is very little accountability in the system. And you do wonder, you know, if we have to be. ever go to a more intense kind of conventional war, you know, what would happen? Sorry, hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, Scott Horton here for Tennessee Hot Sauce Company. Man, this stuff is so good. They get all different flavors. Garlic habanero, honey habanero, pineapple habanero, Pablo, and the Blood Orange Ghost.

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See The Roses, only in theaters, August 29th. Get tickets now. Yeah. Well, I'm sure this is the case for all your great work over the years. I know I've heard from a lot of people, I don't know, dozens, who have told me that they quit the military because they heard my show or read my books. People who never did join the military when they almost did when they were 17, 18, but then somebody showed them or played them something of mine or something like that, you know.

But, you know, one thing that's always... really got me about that because, I mean, there's never much chance I was ever going to join the Army, but I did consider it, you know, when I was 17, 18. That's what you do when you're getting out of high school. It's one of your options. Right. So it's, you know, something that we always think about. So I understand the mindset a little bit, you know, and I grew up in Texas. I'm from Texas. So, and I'm from America. So I understand how we all kind of grow up with this ideal about this is one of the paths at least to how a boy becomes a man and how you you know uh be all you can be and and uh you know do your test it's like a the muja dean going to afghanistan for a tour or whatever

coming home it's uh write a passage for americans and the enemy is always Hitler so it's always the right thing to do that part goes without saying really and then your dad and your gym coach and your minister and everybody in your neighborhood, all your friends, dads, everybody agrees that this is the next step after Eagle Scout, man, this is what you do. You grow up and you join the army, and everybody's proud of you for doing it, and it's all great. And then it doesn't matter at all. It's like an entirely separate conversation that Bill Clinton is the president right now. Don't join his army. You'd have fall Barack Obama into battle. He's going to have you backing al-Qaeda in Syria, or Bush or Trump, for that matter, I don't mean to be partisan about it.

All these guys and all of their wars are just absolutely horrible. And nobody's dad or minister could stand by what we're doing in Iraq or troops in Iraq and Syria right now. 20 years of everybody's got to admit now, shouldn't have done it in Afghanistan. And yet that's like a whole different conversation from whether I should try to stand the test of boot camp. and see if I can do it and see if I could be a Marine too. And all of this stuff, it's somehow, it's going to be honorable anyway, even though you know you're going to be participating in something that's not. It's just like, it's like a left brain, right brain thing or something like,

like the two totally separate conversations. Do you know what I'm talking about? Oh, yeah, yeah. You know, I, I, it's just that, you know, it strikes me. I recently read the memoir of a guy who was a student in Dartmouth, and this was during World War II. And this class at Dartmouth, about 40, about 40 to 42 of them joined, you know, the Army Air Corps en masse. It's the Ivy League, a bunch of young men getting together, you know, enlisting and lifting enlisting and mass because, Because they knew that there was something about World War II and something about Nazi Germany and Japan, there was a reason to go to war, you know, that there was some honor there.

But, you know, I can't imagine today, or, you know, during Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, you can't imagine a class at Dartmouth or Harvard or any of these Ivy League institutions or almost any college where a bunch of young men and women would come together and say, you know, I'm leaving college, I'm going off to fight because I think that this is the right thing to do. And it says something about our country now that men would do that in 1942, 1942, 1933. They would leave a posh life in an Ivy League school and go off the fight. And you just can't imagine anything like that happening today. Because the wars that we're fighting, they're not like World War II. There are wars of choice, and there are wars that are often justified by lies like WMD and Iraq, like Saddam Hussein was somehow behind 9-11. You know, the Vietnam War was, you know, as we know from Pentagon papers, you know,

Ho Chi Minh would have won a free and fair election in the 1950s. The United States said that we would support such an election. only to reverse course. You know, again, these are wars that are built on lies, which is why you don't see, you know, a whole bunch of Ivy League type, you know, joining up to fight them. In fact, we have the all-volunteer military now,

and there's no surprise that the military is having recruiting problems now. It's not because of Joe Biden for giving a little bit of student debt. It's because young people realize, on some level that these wars are not worth fighting. You even have kind of an inverse of that scenario, right? Instead of college kids going off to fight, you have the college draft, which is it started out as a benefit after World War II,

the GI Bill. You're a young farm boy. We sent you off to Europe or Asia to risk your life, and now you come home. You know what? We'll help you go to college if you're white. and then, you know, help you with social mobility and moving up and the American dream and all these things.

And then, but you see immediately the perverse incentive in there, right? It's like paying women to not get married to the fathers of their children or whatever. It's like all of a sudden that means, you know, you're not going to be able to go to college if you don't join the army. That's how you do it. And so now you have people who that's their only route. They have no reason in the world to want to go fight and kill anybody, except that this is essentially, you know, one of the major routes that they could take

to be able to get a college education and that social mobility, you know? Right. No. No, Scott, you make a good point that, you know, the American dream or access to the American dream shouldn't be predicated on the nightmare of war. You know, you shouldn't have to don a uniform and go off to kill foreign people somewhere just to get health care and college eight. Yeah, I mean, the whole system is certainly upside down.

And you don't necessarily have to think the government should pick up those tabs just to know that, boy, if we weren't blowing a trillion dollars a year on militarism, we wouldn't even be worried about being able to afford that stuff, one way or the other. For the very last subject here, you talk me into buying this book. I hope I get to it someday. I'm going to have a whole Vietnam month here and catch all. on a bunch of stuff, but you talk about Robert McNamara and his son. And so I hope people have seen fog of war. It's very important, this great documentary where he sort of admits

it all, but then you talk about his son wrote a book about how, nah, he didn't quite fess up in the end to the whole truth. So what's that about? Yeah, that's a great book that is sunrope, Craig. And it's all about, in the case of McNamara, you know, his son talks about how it was that sense of misplaced loyalty that these guys have. So someone like McNamara, he always had a certain amount of doubt. Hell, you know, even JFK and LBJ had doubt about the Vietnam War, and yet they all suppressed their doubt. And, you know, so in McNamara's case, he knows by 65, 66, you know, the war's not going

well. He doubts whether or not it's winnable, but he doesn't say it. He doesn't say it to the American people. He suppresses all of that out of a misplaced loyalty to President Johnson and the rest of the administration. You know, all of these people, all the way up from, you know, a second lieutenant or even a private, you know, all the way up to the president, we all swear an oath to the U.S. Constitution. You know, we swear an oath to support and defend it. And we all are supposed to be, you know, put honor and integrity and truth first. And yet somehow that becomes twisted.

And that's what happened in the case of Robert McNamara. He basically lied to the American people, and he justified that as, well, I'm doing this out of loyalty, you know, to my peers and the leaders above me. And his son writes about that, and his son writes about, you know, how deeply disappointed he was in his father for his rationalization, basically. And so when, you know, when McNamara finally comes out and says, you know, his Mayor Calpa, you know, we were terribly wrong about the war, it's like his son says, well, that's all well and good. It's not good enough. Yeah. I made a terrible, terrible mistake. Yeah.

Nice. Mia Copa there. I see what you did. You know? Yeah, it's a little bit too late. You know, tell that to the 58,000 American troops who died. You know, tell that to the millions of the people in Southeast Asia, the Laotians, Cambodians, Vietnamese who died in a war that should have never happened.

You know, when Iraq War II was breaking out. And, you know, I was reading anti-war.com every day, so I didn't just know better. I knew every single thing better. And a friend of mine told me, boy, if you'd been alive in the 60s during Vietnam, the lies, it was just like this, but just a thousand times, like just the volume was turned up so much higher because of the level of violence and the level of blatant dishonesty. We're on TV, the TV news would show, yeah, we lost 600 guys today. And then they'd show the briefing from the Pentagon. And he's like, yeah, we lost six guys and took out 600 of the airs. And it was like, man, everybody just saw the pile of bodies on the broadcast.

You know what I mean? And just, and it was like that every day for years and how it's just, you know, that's how I feel about the Ukraine thing now, where we got this border tension with Russia right on their border, you know, with their side threatening to use nukes. And everybody's acting like it's just Friday. And we don't have to worry about whether we're going to make it to Saturday or not. and somehow this is going to just take care of it. So, you know, I was on Fox News arguing with the liberal Democrat. He goes, look, there's mutually assured destruction.

So that means we can't, they won't have a nuclear war with us. In other words, we can keep doing whatever we want in Ukraine. That's our blank check is mutually assured destruction. That's not why he should shut up right now and we should not be doing this because we should feel deterred. He's saying that's why we can't be deterred because we don't need to be deterred because ultimately they'll be deterred? Yeah, well, whoever said that is forgetting the lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis 60 years ago, where we came ever so close, despite all the talk of mutually assured destruction, we really did come very close to destroying ourselves. And that could easily happen again,

especially with all these, you know, maniacs out there, you know, talking about, you know, limited nuclear war again as if it's, you know, just, you know, nothing to worry about. That's completely crazy. I can see the incentives in it, though, right? David Petraeus goes on TV, gets to act all tough. Boy, the Russians better not do this or else we'll do that. And it makes him feel like a tough guy, I guess, good for whatever Instagram score or his pay rate at Raytheon or whatever he works now. I don't know exactly, but they do seem to really kind of believe their own nonsense

when they say, look, Putin is an absolute psychopath, but he'll never nuke us. You know, they just are that arrogant, I think, you know? Yeah, and the system, you know, the system winnows out, you know, people who are actually willing to question it. So by the time you get up to the rank that where Petraeus is, and of course, Petraeus is deeply compromised because, you know, he's now all wrapped up in various think tanks and the military industrial complex. And he makes, he's making money off of it. And so, uh, whatever opinions he, he's basically bought and paid for. Yeah. I mean, he seemed to be speaking under

the authorization of the White House when he said over the weekend that if the Russians use nukes, we will destroy their entire conventional force in Ukraine and sink their black sea fleet, which is a declaration. I mean, he's saying, if you new Ukraine, which is not a treaty ally of ours, that we will start a general nuclear war. Yeah, well, yeah, but it's going to be great to have World War III with nuclear weapons. And these people are just, yeah, anyway, I'm sorry, I've kept you over time and I'm late, I've got to go, but it's great to talk to you again. And I really appreciate this kind of writing, and especially from a man of your

stature and credibility and history, seriously, that it matters a lot when it's coming from a guy like you, Bill. So thank you a lot. So thank you, Scott, for having me again. All right, you guys. That is Bill. A Story. Here he is at Tom Dispatch.com, and of course we ran it at anti-war.com. Something is rotten in the U.S. military. Integrity optional. Please check that out. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APS.Radio.com. Anti-war.com.com. Scott Horton. and libertarian institute.org