Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 2/17/23 Bill Buppert: A Deep Dive into Irregular Warfare

Episode Date: February 23, 2023

Scott brings Bill Buppert on the show for a long discussion centering around U.S. attempts at utilizing irregular warfare since 1945. The two touch on the Afghan surge, the battle of Tora Bora, the Vietnam War, Color Revolutions, Suicide Bombings, Austrian Economics and much more.  Discussed on the show: Chasing Ghosts: An Irregular Warfare Podcast The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn Quigley Down Under (IMDb) “A Clean Break” (The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies) Stalin’s War by Sean McMeekin Jawbreaker by Gary Berntsen Kill Bin Laden by Thomas Greer AKA Dalton Fury “This Air Force commando called in 688,000 pounds of bombs in one battle” (Task & Purpose) Bush at War by Bob Woodward Leap of Faith by Michael J. Mazarr Why The Vietnam War? by the great Mike Swanson Kill Anything That Moves by Nick Turse Dangerous History Podcast Woodrow Wilson Series, Part 1 Wilson’s War by Jim Powell FDR’s Folly by Jim Powell Yesterday's Man by Branko Marcetic By Way of Deception by Victor Ostrovsky Dying to Win by Robert Pape The Dash Podcast Touching the ‘Tism Podcast Bill Buppert is a retired Army officer, independent philosopher, military historian and systems engineer. He hosts two podcasts: Chasing Ghosts and The Dash. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY 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 on the line i have the host of the chasing ghosts podcast chasing ghosts and irregular warfare podcast it's bill bupert welcome the show bill how are you doing

Hey, I'm doing great, Scott, and it is an honor to come on with you because I followed anti-war.com since the beginning of this century, or should I say the beginning of this millennium, and when Ramando was in charge, I was an eager consumer of all the news they had on the site, and it's a really an honor to come on your show. And I listen to your show and I read your books. Great. Well, yeah, I appreciate that a lot. and very happy to talk with you again. It has been quite some time. And so I almost don't know where to begin, but I guess we got to start really with your background. Who are you to have a multiple-part series on irregular warfare? Well, you're really an expert. So is it Army Ranger or Green Beret, or can you tell us your background? I can. So I was originally in the Navy enlisted, got out to go to school. And from there, I transferred to what is now the defunct 19th Special Forces Group in California. And then from there, I got the offer of a commission in the U.S. Army.

And I thought, oh, I'll get a commission in the Army to avoid sea duty, which is what I wanted to do, why I didn't want to get a commission in the Navy after I finished my degree. So I finished my degree, got my commission in the army. I combat arms under first airborne division. As a result of my affiliation with special forces in the reserves, I went on to become a special forces military intelligence detachment commander and the senior intelligence officer at first, the first special forces group in Okinawa. And then from there, I went to a variety of different formations to include infantry, paratrooper, and special forces formations. I retired in 2003. I was a combat tourist on a planetary-wide mission at various neo-imperialist shitpits planet-wide.

And then I found myself taking four years to get the let out, went into contracting with various things. Then I also found myself in 13 and 15, spending almost two years of my life in Afghanistan, in Kabul and its environs, and then up near the Uzbek border and Mazari Sharif, and many places from east to west in Afghanistan proper. And then I got an offer I couldn't refuse to stay home and stop going overseas. And now I am simply an engineer working here locally in Arizona. Okay, right on. Well, so now let's talk about how much you liked Fool's Aaron, Tom and War in Afghanistan. Look at you.

I loved that book. I left a five-star review, of course. And I didn't do that simply because Scott happens to be my acquaintance and I really admire his work. It's because Scott Horton, look at me calling you by, as if you're not even in the room, Scott Horton is the guy who knows where all the bodies are buried for the Afghanistan, Iraq, and greater Middle Eastern crisis that America has been involved in since the turn of the 20th century, really accelerating after World War I. And I mean, what I really liked about Fools Aaron is not only did you say,

speaking to the title, what a fool's errand the entire enterprise was, but how it was based on so many false pretenses across the board, false assumptions, a lack of intellectual heavy lifting, a lack of extrapolation of second and third order consequences. I mean, you know, I, I am hard pressed to think of a general overview of the failure of our time in Afghanistan than fools errand. And by the way, Scott did not pay me for. that uh review no it's not a commercial listen i mean the reason i asked you about that is because you know that's really important to me i was bragging about that to my kent like look you know if anti-war people thought the book was pretty good you know that'd be great but the fact that you

have actual special operations officers army officers who say that this is right that's pretty meaningful you know i don't know i i'm i'm proud of that and i'm I, you know, the book is not written for soldiers. It's not written against them at all. No. You know, I wasn't really considering that they're reading it, but I guess they can tell reading it that I don't hate them, right? It's not an anti-soldier book, but it's just the truth of the thing, and it's supposed to be

a bitter pill. Well, Scott, I'll tell you, it's popular in the special operations community, whether you know that or not. Is that really so? Because I have heard that from time to time, but I don't know how true it is. Oh, absolutely. Now, I hope I'm not jumping the gun here, but I cover irregular warfare, and under the irregular warfare rubric, that umbrella is the terms counterinsurgency and insurgency. And in counterinsurgency among the intelligentsia, the observers, and all the folks who are in that industry or not industry, there are cointrists who are those who are enthusiastic about the West participation and counterinsurgency of any type.

That would be coin denistas, I'm clarifying here. The coinras are myself, John Gentile, Douglas Porch, and some others who are a single-digit percentage of irregular warfare observers who look at this and say, you know, coin doesn't work. As a matter of fact, one of my podcast episodes, if you listen to all of them, one of them was titled The Impossibility of Successful Western Counterinsurgency. And I stand by that. Now, it's a single-digit percentage who does that, but I, I, nor Gentile, nor Porch will get invitations to the Small Wars Journal or speaking engagements at the West Point Institute where it's the Modern War Institute of West Point under which they have the irregular warfare initiative. And in October, November last year, the irregular warfare functional center was stood up by the DoD to start examining this in detail. Over? Well, I mean, you'd think that y'all's community would have grown over the last few years anyway. I mean, after finally given up in Afghanistan, I mean, after the complete hoax of the Afghan surge, you know, with the Iraq surge,

they never even admitted who was who at all. I mean, the whole thing was just a surge on TV more than anything, you know, helping this guy finish their cleansing campaign and all that. But in Afghanistan, man, this was like, they built the lab they were going to hold the experiment in. This is going to be perfect. This is going to be great. And they spent the whole year 2009 on this massive public relations campaign about, you know, the absolute brilliance of these coin. you know the absolute brilliance of these coinedinista technocrats and the just you wait and see how good this is going to be and and it was bad and do this and the whole thing just went completely to hell

immediately sideways yeah and and and and so you know i don't expect them all to admit it and fall on their sword and do a 60 minutes about how sorry they are or anything but it seems like you would have had at least some defections over to y'all's camp inside the sort of retired special operations community among you know people who debate this stuff and if you're saying that gentile like my book then sorry i wrote that nasty email to you john but damn man that ukraine article is horrible but well i don't know if gentile read your book or not i just know of uh lower lower echelon folks who have and approve heartily and even some one of my best friends He and I served in group in the late 90s.

We still corresponded. He lives in North Idaho, and he said, yay and verily. That's great, man. So, listen, I mean, I got you on mostly to plug this great podcast series that you're doing here, which is all about this. And that is, you know, of course, an important part of the book is the surge and the counterinsurgency doctrine. So I guess, you know, I don't know how far back you want to go. Let's start with Petraeus and Mattis. together, he's, you know, Petraeus Army, Mattis Marines, they oversaw the rewriting of the

counterinsurgency manual in time to implement the surge in Iraq War II. So for a guy who already knew what the old manuals said, can you at least tell me what was supposed to be the big deal here with the brilliance of Petraeus and Mattis redoing the thing for the new era? Oh, sure. So that's, I think that's 3-24, the counterinsurgency manual. I may have that designator off. No, that's it. Okay, it's a counterinsurgency manual that was published. And Petraeus took much credit for building it up from scratch. He did not because he lifted a lot from French counterinsurgency from the 50s, 60s and 70s, ignoring, of course, French observers, he was an American of French extraction, Bernard Fall, who tragically died in 1967, who had a lot

of critical things to say about counterinsurgency. He paid attention to Trankier and Galula and others who either ostentatiously or sort of between the lines endorsed torture as a means, endorsed rendition as a means, endorsed separating people and setting them against each other as a means, endorsed concentration camps, but they updated concentration camps to have a more virtual form with biometrics. So you have the barbed wire empire of the English who really pioneered concentration camps and the Germans were paying attention at the end of the 19th century. We fast forward here. And by the way, I don't know if there's evil intent with the writing of that manual. I don't know if all the actors there, all the malefactors who were authors and such

set out to say, we're going to do the most wicked evil thing we can to people when we park this deep state death star over a given country that we decide to target. And from that, we're going to send these beams of government supremacism down to cause all these problems. Because as you know, Bremer and Iraq and Petraeus and company and all the rest of them in Afghanistan, there was not a lot of extrapolation of second and third order effects, extrapolation of unintended consequences. Can I swear on this show, Scott, is that okay? Yeah, go ahead. I'm going to mute it. Okay. But But then we'll know what you said. What I'm going to say is this.

And I found this a guiding light through all historical inquiry of military, whether conventional or regular. And that's this. Newton's third law always has a vote. And Newton's third law is a motherfucker in human affairs. And we find that everywhere. But in wartime, it takes on an even greater impact the way things go down the line. So going to Iraq, which you did such an extraordinary history on, you remember what Bremer did once he got there.

Bremer arrives, and then we have what they call post hostilities, because Bushivik II declares that in 2003, we've conquered it, and we're done. So as a result of that, it's all going to be post-conflict, post-hostilities, and then Bremer comes in and does the most asinine things, for instance, firing. the entire Iraqi army, set in Shia against Sunni, and doing all these things that for most observers, even amateurs like you and I could say, you know, that may not have the best effect. So when we look at Iraq and Afghanistan, we can't simply go back to that publication of the counterinsurgency manual. We have to go back historically to what inspired us to do those very things. So America has not won a conflict since 1945. Now, what I'll get is I'll get naysayers who will say, well, Desert Storm in 1991 was successful.

Well, if it was so successful, why do we find ourselves back in that country a dozen years later? Obviously, on its face, you can say that Desert Storm 1 was a failure. Now, it was a success from a conventional military perspective at the time that it occurred. But after that, all the actions that we took, again, it's deja vu where we take these actions where we don't measure. the unintended consequences like the no-fly zones and things like that. And what that's going to do to the population, even so the military population and the military response. So I stand by that since 1945, America has not won a military conflict. And there are so many reasons for that. In engineering, Scott, we have root causes and proximate causes. The root cause of all of this

is government. The proximate cause is the unaccountability, the failure to measure unintended consequences, the failure to know, well, if we do this, how are we going to tamp or lessen these negative effects that are going to occur over time after we do it? And what I, there's a number of things we're going to talk about here. And I know I feel like I'm a little bit all over the out, but I've got to make this point, is that in the history of warfare as an amateur military historian, no one retains me. It's sort of like you being an independent philosopher, me being an independent philosopher. We don't have any academic credentials to speak of that anybody would sing the praises of, nor do we belong to a university, cast staff, or have tenure,

or anything like that. But here's what I know when I look at military history, going back 3,000 years is that all large military campaigns operations at the strategic and grand strategic level decant and uncork the ability of simmering civil wars and intramural wars between states or peoples and it uncorks that and allows them to go kinetic when they didn't before. The instance that I would give you was World War II. World War II, massive catastrophe on a global scale. But what did World War II do, what's referred to as the bloodlands between Eastern and Western Europe from 1943 to 1948? What they did is they not only allowed the Soviet Union to go in there and make its influence known, but we see this post-colonial rejection where

and I say post-colonial because after 1945 to 1952, if we look at the United Kingdom, for instance, where they had the sun never set on the British Empire, but by the time 1949 rolls around, all they've got is rocks scattered around planet Earth, like Ascension Island, or the one that's in the Indian Ocean, they've got the Falkland Islands, but that's all they have. They've lost India. They've lost all of these places. I mean, so, we What it speaks to is that when you engage in conflict, and I think this is underappreciated and maybe even under-examined, when you engage in larger conflicts, you always decant other conflicts and erect the permissive conditions for them to go kinetic. Does that make sense? Well, so speak more in examples, because, I mean, it seems like. Like, from what I understand, counterinsurgency is basically about making yourself welcome eventually, winning the people over with a two or foreign occupation. And it seems like that's completely stupid and it'll never work. I mean, sure is hell I'm going to work on the Helmand province. But, you know, from what I understood, the experts here always cite Malaya where the Brits just killed everybody.

And use concentration camps. Yeah. And extinguished external support. Right. Or they cite Vietnam. Yeah, they cite Vietnam where the French lost and the Americans lost. Yes. You're right.

But at the same time, though, the Americans in America were successful against the Indians and the Brits in India were successful against those Indians for a very long time. But that encounter insurgency, that's just kicking their ass and occupying them and concentrating them and not playing the counterinsurgency game at all. Is that the discrepancy there? Well, here's the thing about India. Right now in India, it is estimated there are between 175 and 200 insurgencies brewing across the entire subcontinent that the Indian government has to trouble themselves with. And it's been this way at a low brew since 1962 ever since the hot war between Pakistan and India.

So what we discover is that when the colonial powers after World War II depart, they find themselves unable to maintain these colonial powers. And I've got to make a statement here so I clarify for the rest of this podcast. Gentile and Douglas Porch make this point. And I credit them as the authors. but I buy into this 100% all counterinsurgency is updated colonial warfare.

All small wars warfare also dictated as counterinsurgency is colonial warfare. That's what this is. You know, and you've done such a great job over the years, over the, is it decades now that you've done your interviews? Yeah, the interview show is about to turn 20

in a month and a half. Over that time, and tell me if I'm in correct here, you have always said, you may not think the U.S. is an empire, but they are. Am I correct in that? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So, if Pat Buchanan can call it that, then come out of your cell, everybody. It's all right. And it's funny, too, where the elites, both left and right, mostly collectivist in the United States and the West, they poo-poo the idea of empire, but that's what they practice in kind. So I call, you know, if it quacks, like a duck, it's an empire. But in this case, what we're conducting here in Afghanistan,

in Iraq, in Libya, in the Horn of Africa, and all these other places, these things that we call counterinsurgency, I'd like to go back to those terms in a few minutes, if I may, to make them clear to everybody is its colonial warfare. I think I've found, I heard you mention this on the podcast, and I think I have this quote in the book, although I don't remember who I got it from, but where they admitted that, you know, it's just right there in the history. They had to rename counter-revolutionary warfare, counter-insurgency, because counter-revolutionary warfare doesn't test well in American focus groups, right? We like to think of ourselves as, you know, the beneficiaries of the legacy of George Washington and them who fought off the evil empire.

And so, what? Us? The evil empire? No, no, no. We got to rename this thing, something else. It's like they rename the War Department, the Department of Defense, as soon as they stopped defending America and started attacking everybody else. Well, one of the questions I asked folks is that if it's the Department of Defense, why is it that while the Chinese, for instance, have an area access and aerial defensive network that protects their entire coastline there, that anywhere Pacific water washes up on the Chinese mainland, they have a protective barrier there for any incoming. If we took every Thad, every Patriot, every ground-to-air missile modality that we have that can shoot things out of the air, we took all of them from our entire inventory, and we said, look, generals, we have to protect the West Coast, they would not have sufficient coverage of San Diego County, much less the West Coast.

So the DOD doesn't spend a lot of time with the second D. On the other hand, nobody's coming, so who cares? Whole thing is stupid. Ron Paul said we could defend this country with a couple of good submarines and I don't think he was saying by threatening thermonuclear holocaust although it's true that one nuclear submarine

could kill everybody you know every important city in Eurasia anyway but he's just talking about torpedoes you know he's sailing this way and I guess somebody nuked us yeah we could nuke them back

but yeah what more do we need than that? I don't want to be on board the ship that launches a nuclear torpedo by the way yeah me neither There's a hell of a sin to commit. Indeed. All right.

But wait a minute. So what is the difference between before World War II and after? Before World War II, it was, I guess, more acceptable to just say, that's right. We steal and dominate and look at the glory of our empire. And after World War II, Hitler had kind of discredited that kind of domination of other people's nations since he did it in Europe instead of in the global. South or something like that. So it became less fashionable. And power devolved to New York and D.C., which, again, has this at least public relations

campaign that we're anti-imperialists and so couldn't be them ourselves. So let me tease this out a bit because you're a big history geek. I'm a big history geek. The Germans did not have much of an empire. The Germans didn't become a country until 1870. They didn't have much of an empire. Then they wanted to join the Empire Club. They did have German colonies in the Oceania area of the Pacific, and they did establish early German colonies in Africa, but they did not have the sufficiency, the grasp, nor the reach of all the other major colonial powers to include the U.S.

Because, of course, by 1871, we have that failed Korean project where the Americans in their first imperialist project tried to. grab a piece of Korea and failed. And then we have, fast forward to 1890 and we have the Hawaiian Islands and the seizure thereof under the U.S. flag. And then fast forward to 1898. And we have the Spanish getting all of their colonial empires in both the Pacific and the Atlantic, the Caribbean in particular, rested from them and taken over by the Americans. But I've got to tell you, number one. When I characterize World War I and World War II, I'm having a hard time like Neil Ferguson has separating the two. And I really think that what you had was a dull civil war roar between 1918 and 1938. And that if you look at it, I think that between 1914 and 1945,

one could call that the World War War and get away with it. World War I, World War II, those are subsets thereof. But one led to the other. I mean, if there's anything that you know, Scott, in your deep dive examinations you've done, is that you follow these breadcrumb trails. Sure, you can follow the money, but follow the association matrices, follow the people involved in this. And people will discover, for instance, that when it comes to Iraq, our first conflict with Iraq didn't occur in 1991. Our first conflict occurred in the 1950s where Eisenhower threatened nuclear war on Iraq because of their flirtations with the Soviets during that time. I mean, all of this has provenance and birth and further back. Yeah, check it out.

Has provenance and birth further out? And I think the more we examine that, we can get closer and closer to the root cause, but all these proximate causes start to show up in history. And if you don't mind, what I like to do, my first episode of my podcast was called Terms of Endearment, where I talked about terms. Would you mind terribly if I spent a few minutes describing that in regular warfare? Yeah, man, I have... Set the stage.

I still have two hours before my next guest. My plan was to do a deep dive into whatever the hell all you want to talk about and including the wars we're familiar with and those were not and all this stuff. I mean, the podcast is just great, man. I've listened to almost all of them so far. You know what, Scott? That's high praise, by the way, from you because you've been in this business for the longest time. You're O-G. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But, see, man, I got what Biden's got, dude. Now I can't remember what I was going to say. Oh, I know. It was that there's a similarity here in that I think the intended audience. I enjoy listening this because you're talking to your peers and what they're interested in and knowing what they know and what they don't and taking into account, you know, some of their points of view that you can assume and things. that they must have learned, you know, and this and that kind of thing.

And, you know, you mentioned the Long War Journal guys at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. That's why Fools Aaron has written so bulletproof is because somehow I had this weird daydream in my head that that bastard Bill Roggio was going to criticize my book and say that I was wrong. And so then I had just made it extra, you know, titanium armored. It was fortified. It was fortified. It noted all the way to hell and back so that nobody could say anything. about it because I do have a begrudging respect for Rogio because just he's not simply a blowhard, right? He is an expert and he would tell the truth about, you know, U.S. arms in Al-Qaeda's hands

in Syria, even though he hates Iran and all of that stuff. He doesn't hate the Shiites enough to support Al-Qaeda. Come on. And by the way, that makes him special, right? I mean, 10 years ago, the entire establishment was in the tank for the Al-Nusra front. And he was like, what the hell? So anyway. The entire establishment, yes. Yeah, I think it was crazy. But anyway, so he's one of those guys who's like, you know, I have some respect for him, even though I consider him like the best of the war party to be reckoned with anyway.

And, of course, he didn't pay any attention to my stupid book whatsoever. But that was the way I wrote it. But the thing is, it's interesting for a guy like me to listen to a show like yours, which is, you know, not just you doing a show. Or, say, for example, it's different from you talking to me on this. show because it's you on your show talking to them, right? I'm not the intended audience of this thing. It's all these guys who are current green berets who are on their way to go kill somebody who are listening to this thing on their earpaws. Yeah. There's a lot to be said for that. But

you know, here's what I love about your book and others of its ilk is that you and I are swimming against the stream. But cross-examination is the engine of truth. Thomas Coon wrote a book called how scientific revolutions work. I forget K-U-H-N. But what he said, and I think this is the case in almost all human endeavors, is that people get ossified, sclerotic, and arthritic in how comfortable they are with their current paradigms, and they will not brook dissent. They will not brook discontent. They will not brook disagreement. So because of that, you have these kind of notions like we have in the military today where there's so many Coindinistas and they're not looking at the fact that what they're doing isn't working and hasn't worked

and historically what they show as examples, as you alluded to earlier, with the British and Malaya are not counterintuitive at all. They show that counterinsurgency doesn't work. The West is incapable for a variety of reasons for counterinsurgency not to work. not only is the West not oriented or built in a fashion to conduct it in a militarily meritorious way, but there are so many reasons here. One of the proximate causes is that the more women and children that you maim and kill, the stiffer the resistance organizations that you're going to find. One thing I want to point out in Afghanistan, and this is the same case in Iraq,

but at a lower tempo, is that the Taliban is one of hundreds of resistance. organizations in Afghanistan. And this is the conceit that really spoiled the possibility of any success in Afghanistan, was that outside of Kabul, that country doesn't exist, and that the Taliban may have suzeranty and maybe six of the 56 administrative units that America and the West subdivided the Afghan countryside into. But outside of Kabul, I don't know whether to applaud this or just remain neutral about it, but tax-calibated. collectors from Kabul had a very low lifespan when they left to go out into the hinterlands to collect their monies for the central government. And the whole idea of central government in

Afghanistan, it's alien to them. The whole idea of a, mind you, I hope you don't mind me saying this, a Judeo-Christian mindset, which informs so much of the people and the politics and the historiography of going into Afghanistan, they thought that they can impose through their lens, absent and appreciation of Islamic culture, in this case, Sunni and Shia culture, that they could go in there and just maybe like Mormons, wear a black badge, except they carry a gun, and hey, what do you think? Let's talk about this. Let's have a conversation. They don't want that conversation. And by the way, they don't, Afghanistan, you can't build a third world or developing country into a first world country at the point of a gun. You simply can't do it.

why to a certain go ahead we would just I mean even during that war you would have the translator would say to the Marines look man I don't speak Pashto

I speak Urdu I'm from up there and I'll fight for a paycheck but if you think I'm fighting for my country trying to come down here and dominate the people of Helmand you know I'm not interested in that

they don't want me here and I got no interest you know by the way before I forget I really like this one was Colonel Bacevic who was a great dissenter on coin back 10 years ago when it mattered you know

I didn't mention him and he's in my Hall of Heroes oh yeah that's great yeah I've interviewed him a lot of time I guess I haven't read anything by him in quite a while but he did a symposium thing where they invited him to be the naysayer at one of these Coindinista conferences and so they got up there

and talked about how smart they were the whole time and then he got up and he talked about oh yeah here's i got a great idea here's what we're going to do and he talked about implementing the coin doctrine in afghanistan in glowingly positive terms right but then the twist at the end was you know this is a country's dominated by narco terrorists and all this corruption and language barrier and all of these things we're going to do all of this in mexico come on guys let's all go to mexico who in this room believes that we could do a successful counterinsurgency campaign

where we send the U.S. military to invade and remake the government of Mexico, choose good men to run it, pacify any resistance in the population, eliminate narcotics and their negative influence in the black markets and in crime and this and that and turn Mexico into the kind of place that Woodrow Wilson would have us turn it into. Who's with me? Come on, guys. And then the fraud was up. Everybody knew nobody in the world is going to sit there and say that this would work in Mexico.

And so what's the difference? The difference is Afghanistan is so far away that the American people can't hear these people screaming as they die. And so we don't really know. So they get to fail where nobody can see them. But they know that it's a hoax. They know that they're liars. Afghanistan is the size of Texas. It's full of people who hate their guts.

And they know it. Let me bring up two quick points riffing off what you were saying about Mexico. Number one, I feel sort of like it was a small gift that Al-Qaeda based themselves out of Afghanistan instead of Mexico City. Because the logic is because Al-Qaeda based themselves and conducted these attacks out of Mexico City will invade the country of Mexico. That doesn't make sense on any level at all. But that is the rationale that was employed. for Afghanistan. And when you look at the Colombian FARC and you look at the various Colombian irregulars and insurgents down there, the only reason they exist is because of America's

drug prohibition policies. I guarantee you, you mentioned narco-terrorists in Afghanistan. I guarantee you if America in the West decriminalized, not legalized, because I don't think legalized is a good thing, decriminalized drug use, the FARC would turn to dust. The same thing in Afghanistan, you would not, or they would come to the surface, as we've seen here with marijuana cultivation. I have a relation who used to be an underground marijuana horticulturalist. Now he's making big money with a big marijuana combine here in the U.S. setting up growth facilities. So that's what you mean in the discrepancy between legalized and decriminalized is focusing on legalizing the business and the trade of it rather than the consumption of it. Is that what you mean?

Or what is the day? I do. Well, if I may, we're going a little off topic. I just want to make sure I understand what you mean. Well, you're teasing out something really important to me. And that's that, this particular relation, he was in a West Coast state. He had 56,000 plants on which he had to have 56,000 different RFID discrete identifiers reportable to the Oregon state government at the time under legalization. So my whole notion is this, is that legalization invites the government into your business.

De-criminalization makes it so that, for instance, look at when it comes to, folks marrying folks that aren't their same melanin content. We haven't legalized that. We decriminalized it. And by decriminalizing, it keeps the government out of it. That's my distinction. I got you. Yeah. All right. And of course, that's true, right? I mean, and we saw right away when they started legalizing pot and growing it and the business of it, not just the consumption of it in the United States, that the cartels in Mexico were publicly complaining. Oh, man, now we're not making anybody, any money in cannabis anymore. We've got to switch to something else. So they started making more myth, I guess. Yeah. Well, I mean, look what happened in California now. Now, having a,

I'm a graduate of Humboldt State University. So if you find Berkeley to right wing and oppressive, you go to my school. And that's where I got my degree. But fortunately, I ran into two Austrian economists, believe it or not, Scott, hiding in the basement at HSU, who helped to save me from falling into the government supremacist philosophical abyss that most universities have. And as a result of that, I consider myself an amateur Austrian economist and observer. And I bring that Austrian lens, which you're very acquainted with, to my examination of a regular warfare, which I think is what makes me rather unique in my perspective, among other things. That makes sense?

Yeah. And, well, so elaborate, though. What do you mean by that? So I'm going to give a quick thumbnail sketch of Austrian economics that's going to last less than a minute, I hope, which is that this, unlike all the other schools, the Keynesians, the monitors, and monitors are nothing more than mathematically enabled Keynesians and the Marxists and all the rest. All of those are what I refer to as government supremacist schools of economics and thinking in which they think that the collective is the ultimate arbiter of how to rational. and morally allocate resources. The Austrian school thinks that the ultimate arbiter and rational allocator and moral allocator from both a consequential and a moral perspective is the individual.

And it is an economic school that examines how societies work, not how they should work. It just so happens consequentially that because they tend to be free marketeers, that kind of liberation from government coercion, in my mind, makes them better or more moral people. Yeah. Well, folks, sad to say, they lied us into war. All of them. World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq War I, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq War II, Libya, Syria, Yemen, all of them. But now you can get the e-book, All the War Lies, by me for free. Just sign up for the e-eepbook. email list at the bottom of the page at scott horton.org or go to scotthorton.org slash subscribe get all the war lies by me for free and then you'll never have to believe them again hey y'all scott here let me tell you about roberts and roberts brokerage ink who knew artificial bank credit expansion leads to price inflation and terribly distorted markets if you've got any savings left at all you need to protect them need to put some at least into precious

Well, Roberts and Roberts can set you up with the best deals on silver, gold, platinum, and palladium, and they've been doing this since 1977. Hey, if you just need some sound advice about sound money, they're there for you, too. Call Tim Fry and the guys at 800, 874-9760. That's 800, 874-9760, or check them out at r-rbi.co. That's r-rbi.com. You'll be glad. you did. Well, and they kind of, I mean, I see it this way. I think I already did, which was the

appeal of Austrian economics to me, was sort of see. Not that this would be in all cases objectionable morally, although usually, but just on the descriptive kind of basis, that pretty much essentially any government involvement in anything is only going to cause some kind of temporary disruption or at least it could cause a permanent disruption but one that really bends the natural order of things in a way that for the most part if you pull that intervention back things are going to snap back to the way that they were again and all almost always is just causing a problem delaying a solution and getting in the way causing a new problem that now needs solving with even more government intervention that kind of thing and you get some of that

from the classical school in Chicago types. Like, they understand capitalism and markets, but it's not exactly the same as the Austrian school where it's, you know, there's this sort of natural order that government can pretty much only disrupt. I'll tell you what I also appreciate about the Austrian school. Again, not that the natural order is always the moral good. I'm not saying that, but I'm just saying,

descriptive, not normative. Oh, certainly. And what I really appreciate about the Austrian schools, I think that the other mathematical schools, especially the Keynesians and the monitors, get lost in the mathematical forest and they lose the significance of the trees as rational or irrational actors, but nonetheless, they've got to vote. There's a qualitative necessity to Austrian inquiry, and that's what I think I sort of bring to this is that I'm saying, here's what the numbers show, but qualitatively, when I examine this,

what I'm discovering is that whatever aspirations and results and scenarios you're bragging about, it doesn't mean what you say. It's sort of like from the Princess Bride. I don't think you know what those words imply or infer. And there's a lot of nonsense that goes on in the military when it comes to irregular warfare. And let me take a moment to do this. Here's what irregular warfare is. It's everything that isn't conventional warfare. Conventional warfare would be formations standing up like World War I, World War II, and very large wars going back to the Napoleonic era and what the Romans conducted 1,500 years earlier than that. A regular warfare is guerrilla warfare, unconventional warfare, insurgency, the resultant counterinsurgency, terrorism,

the resultant counter in terrorism. And then in what's called fourth and fifth generation warfare, And there's debate within the academic community on whether those even exist or whether there's even a bifurcation. We have gray zone hybrid warfare, which says, well, what about color revolutions? Well, what about, and I do think color revolutions are a regular warfare. What about the use of computer hacking, not ethical hackers, but the other kind of hackers? What about black psychological operations? What about civil affairs where we're not doing the right thing in that country? We're trying to direct them in a fashion that goes completely against how that country has done things for hundreds or thousands of years.

So irregular warfare as a modality is political, as is conventional warfare. It takes it in different directions and the bifurcation between conventional warfare and irregular warfare is that conventional warfare tends to be planes, trains, and automobiles, tanks, artillery, naval, whole of government war machine operations. And I want to emphasize this, that irregular warfare can occur in concert with conventional and it can occur not in concert with conventional where it's exclusively irregular warfare. Now, and I want to say this is that there was a movie with Matthew Quigley called Quigley Down Under. I consider myself sort of like Quigley, not as handsome, but I sort of, because people will say, well, Bill, you know all about irregular warfare.

what about conventional warfare? I've been there, done that, and I have a very deep understanding of that. So those who say, well, I'm concentrating on regular warfare, I am because the market dictates that there aren't many podcasts nor folks out there speaking to the cointra attitude and perspective, and I'm trying to fill that gap. But it doesn't mean I don't have an understanding of conventional warfare because I have a very deep understanding of that from the tactical to the operation. to the strategic and grant strategic level.

Well, so, I mean, back to just the bottom line of this thing, that isn't it just a fraud? I mean, so people might remember Ron Paul had this video ad that came out. I think it was originally a speech that he gave on the House floor, and then someone made an ad out of it. And he said, look, everybody, just imagine that the Chinese somehow invaded and occupied Texas, the PLA, occupied Texas. And then he just described America in Iraq, you know, driving around, looking for bad guys,

accidentally killing some people and deliberately killing other people and doing all these kinds of things. And he just basically described the Iraq occupation. We said, imagine this is Chinese troops in Texas. And part of it was, and they keep telling us, oh, yeah, no, we love you to death. And we're only trying to kill the bad guys, not you good people who we love you and your democracy and the thing, that we would just keep shooting them all anyway. until they were either dead or packed up and left and that's just how it is there and they're

no less alien than american military forces in iraq or afghanistan i mean i could even say bill like if you you know i don't know exactly what was going on in these coops head but it does seem that at least some of the time how about that richard pearl and paul wulfowitz seemed to want to invade iraq turn the place over to chaliby and get the hell out of it out. That was why they talked about this light and fast. We could do it with 50,000 men. They didn't want to occupy the place with 300,000 men. It was, you know, the rest of the government said, no, we're staying forever in force. And then they did this whole deep authentication and this and that. Maybe they were going to do that and then leave. But, um, well, an American army chief of

staff lost his job because he said 300,000 would be needed. Yeah. So and then, but the spin there was, yeah, he was right. And they fired him for telling the bitter. truth when it seems like actually the idea is that they knew better than to try that they were going to turn their whole plan if you read the clean break they were going to turn it over to the Shiite supermajority let them fight their civil war or compromise if they have to we'll be gone by then and but they'll the Shiites will win and then but they'll be our Shiites and because Chal will be promised and so then they'll make Hezbollah stop being mean to Israel and you know stop being friends with Tehran and and then go start putting

pressure on Tehran next after that. And you've noticed this is all against the Shia. But if they knew that, then that means the rest of the damn government knew. These people are never going to accept that you're going to do this our way now with this white, at least, led Christian army occupying their territory and choosing major sectarian factions against the other and this kind of thing. The West would never tolerate that scenario in their own countries or contiguous countries. I mean, it's just completely ridiculous.

Never mind to say that, like, well, we're so powerful China could never try it because that's the truth. But just as a hypothetical, if you imagine it for one second, the answer is we would all shoot them until we were out of bullets and then we'd make more. Well, as a matter of fact, you can say that, and this is a swag, there is 10% of any given population in any country on Earth at any time who will always resist an invasion. invasion, always. And I would tell you, there's, there's bonus points for Islamic countries, because Islamic countries, whether Shia, Sunni, or whatever the case may be for their particular sect, they have an honor code that demands a remedy for slights that they perceive among them. They hold these slights for decades. They hold these slites for centuries. I mean, one thing that we think about the Afghans is we think, oh, they're

just, they're an underdeveloped. They're a third world country. They're not sophisticated. They're very sophisticated people. They're very family oriented people. And I'm not, you know, you got left and right bell curves here. Are you going to have evil people on the left and right? Of course you are. But the majority of people there are just trying to live their lives, grow their families, and stay out of trouble. For instance, here's what really irritates me, and you may have covered this in the past. People go there and complain again about the corruption in the third world and the developing world. There's no, the only difference between corruption in the third world and corruption in the United States is we institutionalize a

corruption. They don't. They're more direct about it. And Americans or Westerners would go to Afghanistan and say, oh, why is it that the first 10 days when we send them fuel on a monthly basis, all that fuel's gone in 10 days. And I've looked at the rep reports and it shows that they haven't even left the area. That's because within 24 hours of the delivery of that fuel by the allies in Afghanistan to that particular collaborator or Afghan army unit, the commander's selling, he's selling it to his friends, his family, his business associates. The Taliban? Of course they don't.

No, everybody across the board. You name the faction, even the Afghan National Army, was doing this because one thing you discovered is that you go over there and as a regular army officer, you say, well, why are you taking a vig off of your soldier's paychecks? For instance, let's suppose this is a hypothetical amount, $10,000 for a battalion of 300 troops, the Afghan National Army. And we give that to them the first month. We give it to the commander so he can meet the payroll of his troops.

He takes a 10 or 20 percent Vig off of that. And Western professional soldiers can say, well, that's awful. Well, by the way, that's the way it's done. As a matter of fact, the soldiers under him expect it. That's just a part of the nonsense was so. much coin going back across the board, whether it's French, British, US, or German, is they have these Western expectations of behavior in these countries that they parked these deep state death stars over. And they assume that overnight, they're going to assume their Western

tendencies, their culture. No, they're not. Because they look at you as you described as an alien. But that's the question. And I know that people like believe in their own BS and, you know, that one quote we all do to a certain extent yeah and there's that guy that said people don't like changing their mind when their paycheck depends on them can you know follow the money yeah there go so uh you know i get that but at the same time that is the question that you know on the table though is is it not just a fraud did not david petraeus and stanley mcrystal know that they're not going to remake afghan pashunistan they were just adding time to the washington clock so that they and their boys can get their tickets punched, get their promotions, move on in a, you know, very kind of public relation, or, pardon me, a public choice theory, economics type of a situation where they're just in it for themselves. They don't give a damn about the enlisted men. They don't give a damn about Afghanistan. You know, Petraeus got to Afghanistan. He didn't even try to implement coin. He just increased air strikes, night raids. So, in other words, to refine the question,

little bit more carefully, I guess, would be in the year 2009, when they were pushing that giant PR campaign, that look at us in our brand new counterinsurgency manual and our brilliant new leaders, McChrystal and Petraeus, the most brilliant American military leaders since forever, that they knew they were lying then, that they were really just, you know, holding their jobs, as Mencken would say, making their money, getting their tickets punched, and, you know, selling a lie that's good enough for 60 minutes to regurgitate, good enough for the people who wanted to believe in Obama and McCain to believe in, and to continue the war for another little while, right? Wasn't that the truth of it that they knew good and goddamn well just as well as you

and me back 13 years ago? So here's what I can't do. I can't get in the mind of another human being, much less a guy like yourself, and know why you do what you do. I can assign that after the fact, but I'll never know for certain. But here's what I will know for certain is that if you follow the money with military spending, you discover why you remain in a war. I used to be, in my youth, I used to be really skeptical of folks who would say, well, it's a military industrial complex and it's this. And it's that here's the conclusion I've come to is that this is a huge money laundering operation, all of these wars for the military industrial complex. And you can add whatever you want to military industrial if you think that there

are other identifiers out there for it. But for instance, look at Ukraine, for instance, all the monies that we've spent, maybe it's 110 billion or whatever it is, two-thirds of that money never leaves DC in the Beltway and manufacturers and all that. That's, it doesn't happen. It's the same thing with Israel, too. All that's just going to Lockheed. which the Israelis get the weapons, the Americans get the money. I can't speak to that specifically, but what I'm saying is that in the broader brushstroke, I can't get in the head of individual actors in Afghanistan, but every year a new general officer gets there with his four stars. He stands at that country at that very luxurious compound in Kabul, and he puts his hands on his hips,

and he says, he's got this. He doesn't have anything, because nothing changes. nothing gets better and things get progressively worse. Well, tell me more about your time as a Green Beret and Missouri Sharif then. I mean, did you guys all say to each other from the moment you got off the plane? They're like, oh, yeah, right, this is going to work. Because I hear that a lot. In fact, a guy just said to me on the Twitters the other day that I'm pretty sure it was Afghanistan.

I believed in it until I got to Afghanistan. And then after about a week, I was like, oh, this is completely crazy and stupid. What am I doing here? So I've, and that's what all of us experienced. And I want to put, I need to put a real big corrective out there because I hate stolen valor. I am not a green beret. I'm not a special forces guy. I'm not a graduate of the Q course. And I'm sorry, I'm not aware. It's okay. No, it's okay. I'm just trying to clarify that. I'm not aware of this and that and whatever. So what exactly was your name rank and serial number then? So I, I was a military intelligence officer after my combat arms a session. So what happened is my first. four years, we're spending combat arms in the 101st Airborne Division, third of the 502nd. And then after that, they said, now that you've done that, your real military specialty, which is military intelligence, you're going to have done that hat now and go to those schools and stuff.

And it was really wise to do that because to be a military intelligence geek from the time you're a second lieutenant is the wrong answer. You want to go in combat arms because if you're there, you know why intelligence exists in the first place, which is to serve the combat arms. whatever they're going to do in conventional or regular warfare. And 13 and 15, when I was in Afghanistan, I'd been retired since 2003. So when I went there in Kabul in 2013, my main job was training the Afghan general staff. And then the second time I went in 2015 up in Mazari Sharif near the Uzbekia border,

I was training two Afghan special forces and commandos battalions up there. So that was my job when I was up there. And all of us were pretty cynical about what was happening, what was going on. We would have entire Afghan special forces teams leave and go over to the Taliban or just disappear entirely. Because what you discover is that special operations forces, rangers, seals, special forces, those kind of things. These are very expensive, first world, affluent, luxury, top-notch military organizations that are very expensive. to train, very expensive to maintain, and some of them have, like in Marsock and the Air Force Parer Rescuemen, they have a three-year plus training pipeline. They're not doing, they're training

that entire time. So these are very expensive forces of the 78,000 personnel, now maybe off by a few thousand, in U.S. Special Operations Command based out of Tampa, 10% of those guys are carnivores, trigger pullers. The remaining tooth to tail is roughly 10 to 1, which means, that logistics, combat support, combat service support across the various services. So not a lot of trigger pullers in Socom, a lot of support, but that's the way of modern Western warfare where America industrialized warfare to an extent no one else did. As a matter of fact, if it weren't for America, the Russians would not have had the successes that they did in World War II because we subsidize our army from day one.

of our involvement in that conflict. Well, yeah, and with trucks and boots, rifles and spam to eat. Yeah, that'll do it. Yeah, the numbers are hideous. 94% of all locomotives in the USSR during the entirety of that war were provided by the United States, and the entire suspension system for the T-34 was designed by an American engineer. I didn't realize that. I bet you that's an Anthony Sutton and I'd forgotten.

You know, there's a book called Stalin's War, and I forget the author, but it's called Stalin's War, and the author does a really good deep dive examination of Len Lease, because the British paid off their Len Lease debt in 2007. The Russians never did from World War II. That's funny. Yeah, that's what they call AD Ukraine now, Len Lease. What a great. You know they tested that in front of a focus group. Oh, of course they did. A D.C. focus group anyway. I don't know. Americans might be like, what the hell is that anyway? I wanted to, if I may, Scott, I want to talk a little bit about some of the components and parts of why counterinsurgency doesn't work for the West. Go for it, man. So I, looking at this through my Austrian lens, there's this concept, this isn't Austrian,

this is Nassim Taleb, and I know you're familiar with it, fragility and anti-fragility. Do you know what that is? Maybe your audience doesn't. Well, I've heard you talk about it on the show there. Okay. Okay, so here's what anti-fragility is. If you lift weights, because of those stressors, you are, to a certain extent, destroying muscles, but you can't build muscle mass without destroying muscles.

Stressors make anti-fragile systems stronger and don't collapse them and destroy them. They become resilient. They become much more less fragile, as it were. Free market's a great example of this, where it's an anti-fragile system because you may have stressor points in various areas, but those stressor points lead to innovation, price decrease, prices, price increases, and what the free market delivers to us in spades, which is these billions of unsubsidized transactions that take place that determine what the rational allocation of resources is despite what our government central planners think that they can do, which they

can't. When I look at, for instance, I look at the USSR, despite our logistical support to them, the entirety of the war. From 19. to 1945, you see this really innovative change take place in the Russian armed forces that allows them to best the Germans on the Eastern Front and drive all the way to Berlin. It wasn't only what we provided them logistically, but there were a learning organization that learned from their failures. As a matter of fact, I would call SpaceX, Elon Musk, I'm a big fan for a variety of reasons. is SpaceX is an anti-fragile market organization in my mind, because when it came to failure,

he did not retreat or look the other way. He examined that failure and said, what did we do wrong and how can we unscrew ourselves? He's one of those rare market combines that actually embraces an anti-fragile culture. So here's what I say. My thesis is all Deep Star Death State coin efforts by the West since the end of World War II. And maybe we can go back even further than that are fragile efforts that have so many points of failure that they don't pay attention to to remedy those points of failure. Well, that's what Petrault himself said. All of our gains are wonderful, but they're all fragile and reversible.

Amidly reversible. And so here's my other contention on the converse is that all insurgencies, and there may be some few exceptions here, all insurgencies are naturally anti-fragile. and they're naturally anti-fragile for a variety of reasons. One of the reasons is they know the turf, they know the terrain, they know the people, they've lived there for 100 years. That gives you a big advantage. And they've got an inexhaustible supply of people to just walk in as volunteers to fight, as you said, the more you kill, not even just innocent people, but the more you kill anybody, the more volunteers you have to resist. That was Dan McChrystal himself, his insurgent math. Kill two, get 20.

That's right. And we're going to talk about grunt math in a few minutes. But kill two women get 40, you know, kill two kids, get 60. Yes. Yes. And it's exacerbated for another sociological reason in Afghanistan and Iraq that we don't have in the West. That's the fact that you will have up to four generations living under a single roof. And you have a culture that remedies any kind of flaws, faults, or things that have happened to that family.

They find out who did and they go after them. We don't do that in America. And we've got neighborhoods in Iraq and Afghanistan, you have hundreds of close neighbors. You don't have where there's some places here in America where people don't even know who they've been living next door to for 10 years. But over there, it's very serious. And I think part of that too is oral history and oral culture. I do think, and this is my intuition. I don't have the backing for this.

Maybe one of your audience members would know. I think when you're not a reading culture, but you're a speaking culture, an oral culture, as we have in Afghanistan and illiterate societies by Western standards, I think those parts of their brains that process oral history and remembrance are more sophisticated for retaining verbal memory than we are because we're readers. Does that make sense? Yeah, sure. Just like when you go blind, you learn to hear, you increase your hearing. skills is kind of thing. So, and what that also means is here's another thing. It enhances grudges, right?

That makes sense. Yeah. Hey, did you hear about, you know, rumors getting passed around, gossip about who's guilty and who deserves what kind of come up and? And then when there's nothing like anything even pretending to be a sort of objective Sheriff's Department with no dog in the fight where everybody's a dog in the fight, you know. You win the internet today because we're going to do grudge enhancement studies from now on in the third world.

So they're anti-fragile, and you can't kill these rebellions. You can't kill these insurgencies for the reason you described as far as maiming and killing, women and children, even sliding them. Imagine Afghanistan is between 2001 and 2005, and here's two examples. You come to a checkpoint, a woman is at the checkpoint. She's going through the checkpoint to go to her get groceries on an errand, whatever she's doing in her traditional garb. and an American soldier touches her. If her blood relations find out about this, they are obligated to make a remedy for that of some sort,

whether it's kinetic or not. And it certainly doesn't put the occupying forces in a good light for the village proper. And then there's another apocryphal story where a young troop, he's probably 20, 19, 20, 21, he thinks it's funny to put urine in a gatorade bottle and he passes through this village every day and children come around to get

candy bars, whatever the case may be. He hands a gatorade bottle full of urine to a child and one of those children drinks it. Maybe he spits out. Maybe he doesn't even drink it. He spits it out. There again, you have these unintended consequences and the entire village is going to know about that.

And the men in that village will never forget that. That will enhance their grudges, as Scott Horton would say. Again, I mean, the shoe on the old other foot thing works every time. Jeez, some occupying army did that to kiddo in our neighborhood would be upset. I think no matter who you are.

Yeah. Now, maybe there's certain burgs in America where that would be something where they say, well, so what? But I think most of America would not be that way. And we talked about, you had intimated about where the recruitment of 20 to 40

when a woman is dishonored in some fashion. There's another grunt math here, another grunt math calculus, and that's this. The IRA post-World War II between the peace agreements in the 1990s and when they really started to get fired up from 1960 on with the troubles, they had a total paramilitary trigger puller force with bomb makers and some very active auxiliaries of about 500. against those 500 were levied approximately 55,000 royal ulster constabulary, military forces, S.A.S., Britain's, the British military's finest, Irish military, you name it, and they still didn't best them. And let's go back in time to 1918. It's November 8th. It's November 1918. The Germans have surrendered. And Leto Vorbeck, Paul Emo Leto Vorbeck, and I talk about him in my podcast series, and I'm going to devote an entire episode to him, he remains the only undefeated German general on planet Earth as a result of his exploits in southern Africa during the entirety of that war in which he gets virtually no support whatsoever from the mother country in Germany.

at his peak, he had forces of what were called Schutz Troopa, mostly black troops and black NCOs and white officers. That's, it's just sign of the times of approximately 10,000 at its maximum. Against whom during that entire time, the allies levied almost a half million troops, and I think they cycled through like four dozen general officers, none of whom defeated Leto Vorbeck. So that's what I call grunt math. That's what I call it's like a guerrilla calculus where you don't need significant numbers of active shooters and trigger pullers to do what you have to do. It's what the IRA said to Maggie Thatcher in, I think it was in 1980s.

She said, they said, you know what, you have to be right all the time and we have to be right once. Yeah. And that's the way it works, planet wide, east or west. one proviso I have to provide to my audience is that I do not speak any Asian languages. Because of that, I can't research primary source documentation on my own. So I can find most of my analysis to Western insurgency, counterinsurgency, and guerrilla organizations and unconventional warfare, and some of where they meet each other, where East and West, like in Vietnam, or Laos or Cambodia, is Sri Lanka, places like that. But I don't spend a lot of

time with with east against east coin well i hate to say this because i know it ain't true but hey bill what about the terror war being over and now it's the time of great power conflict with russia and china again if anybody's fighting an insurgency it's uh russia well they're fighting ukraine's army now but it'll be an insurgency later i hate to say that i think even if the president of ukraine made a deal where he gave up the dombas i'm not so sure that the rest of his government would go along with him on that. I think that there are some who might keep fighting even if their military was smashed, which, after all, if you go back a year ago, that was the plan.

The idea, it was presumed that Russia would destroy the Ukrainian state army and that we would be, as they said, over and over again on the Afghan model from the 1980s. They told the New York Times, I got a bunch of quotes I'm collecting them for my book, where um geez you know uh the last 20 years of war proves that we don't know anything about how to fight an insurgency but we sure know how to back one like we did in afghanistan and like we did in syria which i just love that so much that this is literally four or five months after losing afghanistan and humiliating defeat after fighting supposedly the consequences of that 80s intervention

there back so long ago. It's just months after the absolute humiliating defeat and withdrawal from Afghanistan. And then even if 1980s, Rambo 3, Afghanistan is ancient history in the minds of many people, what about Obama's

dirty war in Syria? That's the model. Back in al-Qaeda, which blew up into the Islamic State Caliphate that conquered all the Western Iraq, and they had to launch a Rock War III to destroy it again. Amen. And they go, yeah, what we're going to do is we're going to do like we did in Afghanistan and Syria, because we're so good at this.

But, however, though, and you can see there's all these great quotes, too, about how, now we're the good guys again. That whole terror war thing, that never happened. Forget that. This is our redemption. Now we're back on the side of the little guy against the evil empire, the Russians. And remember that time we liberated France from the nation? Nazis. And so, never mind the Nazis in this situation, we're back in them against the Russians, and that's what makes us heroes again. That's what Ben Rhodes, Obama's guy told the New York

Times, and that's what Brett Stevens wrote in the New York Times. Keep those quotes. Never mind Vietnam. Think of Yorktown, he said. Indeed. And it's so ridiculous. And then you just mentioned the French in World War II with the Marquis and the French resistance and such, most of which, by the way, were communist cells because the communist cellular structure had been attacked by the French themselves in 1930s trying to squash the communist threat in their country. Conceivably, if it weren't for the communist cellular structure and the tribulations

they went through in 1930s, no French resistance or the Marquis could have had the means to stop the Germans from. They called counterinsurgency counterbanded operations. They would not have been able to sustain themselves. and then provide the irregular warfare expertise they did in assisting the American and Western forces on June 6, 1944, when they invested themselves and expanded the lodgment in Normandy and started to march on Berlin. That would have happened absent that. And then we fast forward a few years to Indochina and to Algeria, and you discover in the 1950s that the French completely forgot that they were guerrillas and they completely forgot how guerrillas work and how they, they operate. And by 1962, they lose both of the, well, by 56, they lose, 54, they lose

Indochina. And then America takes over, as you alluded to. And then 62, they lose Algeria. So in other words, even though they had just fought a successful insurgency or at least, you know, fought the Nazis to a standstill, when it came to Algeria, what, like, they just wanted to consider themselves so superior to these Africans that they couldn't, like, transform themselves into special operations snake eater type forces to meet insurgents, you know, on their own level? Well, here's a dirty little secret. And I hope somebody in your audience can provide me with a counter, but I have yet to see one is that special forces, green berets, as you call them. By the way, they don't call themselves green berets.

They call themselves SF or special forces. But nonetheless, they destroy themselves enough enough yet. No, no. What the hell they're? Just isn't. No, it's the same thing. You know, we're science fiction folks, you'll say sci-fi and stuff. they'll go, no, it's S.F.

I got it. It's the same thing with, with it. It's just a, a small point of, point of It's like at the Institute. I don't like it when people say the L.I. It sounds too much like why. That's not right. It's the Institute. All right. Sorry, go ahead. Is that is that S.F. in Afghanistan, Iraq, and later on in Libya and Horn of African stuff, destroyed themselves by completely obviating their unconventional warfare means and skill sets so that they could kick open doors in the middle of the night and shoot people in the face, bound men, you know, rendition them, and bring them back and deliver them to McChrystal or whoever else. They completely obviated the very reason Special Forces as a U.S. Army organization was set up in 1952,

which was to conduct partisan operations and act as a force multiplier behind enemy lines when we were fighting the big bad Soviets so that they could send a 12-man team in and they would erect a battalion or a regiment of up to 800,000 men who would fight behind enemy lines and provide those kind of force multipliers in the war calculus. Completely obviated that. Now, there were so many ways to,

to make that work. For instance, whatever you think about it, in the fall of 2001, when we landed boots in Afghanistan, SF were the only guys there. They were riding horses. They were relying themselves with Northern Alliance. And they were saying, look, you guys are third world Afghan infantry grunts, but we can provide you with air support, logistical means, things like that. Sort of working.

If you suspend your disbelief in these nation building projects and think, well, what if they wanted to take out the Taliban, then big army comes in and everything falls apart from December 2001 forward and you have the mess that you so ably demonstrated in fools errand. Yeah. Hey guys, Scott here for Leo Hamill find jewelers out of San Diego at Jewelrystores.D.com. They do business nationwide. They sell jewelry and watches, specializing in engagement rings.

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They deal nationwide over the phone at 619-299-1500. That's Leo Hamill, Fine Jewel, Fine Jewelers out of San Diego. Diego. Go to Jewelry StoreSD.com to check out their fine selection and to find out more. Hey, y'all, you should sign up for my substack. It's Scott Horton's show.substack.com, and if you do that, you'll get the interviews a day before everybody else, but not only that, they'll be free of commercials. How do you like that? Pretty good, huh? Scott Hortonshow.substack.com. Hey, y'all, libertosbella.com is where you get Scott Horton Show and Libertarian Institute shirts,

sweat shirts, mugs, and stickers and things, including the great top lobstas designs as well. See, that way it says on your shirt, why you're so smart. Libertas Bella, from the same great folks who bring you ammo.com for all your ammunition needs, too. That's libretasbella.com. Well, so let's go ahead and go on that tangent for a minute about Toribora. So one of the things that, well, first of all, when I read, when I did Fool's Air and I had read Gary Bernson about Torabora, But when I did enough already where I have less on Afghanistan, by then I had read Thomas Greer, aka Dalton Fury, who was the Delta Force commander on scene there. So Gary Bernson was the CIA Special Activities Division commander there.

But anyway, so both of them basically tell the same story that I just could not understand why they wouldn't give us the men they needed. And that included a bunch of special forces guys under Mulholland. And apparently Christopher Miller, who was the Secretary of Defense for the last minute there under Donald Trump, he was there fighting under this guy, Colonel Mulholland, who Greer complained wouldn't give him some men. And he talks about these guys, these red-bearded National Guard specials. forces from Alabama and how if if these men were invited along on the hunt boy they would have come along and it would have been fine and they wouldn't have used them as the tip of the spear but they would have been able to provide some perimeter security this kind of thing and this is all denied by colonel moll holland and i believe it's you know clear that on orders from bush cheney and

donald rumsfeld and one thing i didn't know okay it wasn't was it wasn't denied by Moholland. It was denied by the 10th Mountain Group commander. I mean the 10th Mountain Division commander who was on the scene. There were differing objectives that they had. And SF wanted one kind of effort done, but the 10th Mountain Division commander overruled him and did not allow that to happen, which led to the disaster I think you're going to talk about. Hmm. Okay. So, and then the division, I mean, not the division, but the split here being, should we fight al-Qaeda or should we fight the Taliban, right? Are we going to screw around in Missouri Sharif, 600 miles away from where it matters, or four, whatever it is? Or are we going after

bin Laden and Swahari? They're getting away. That's the split. You're talking about, right? Yeah. It is. But what happens is once big army comes in, 10th Mountain Division in this case, and then the 82nd and the 1001st and all the rest of them, they have a very conventional lens that they look at this through. And through that conventional lens, it's a very big footprint that they want to put down. And because of that, because they're fighting against an insurgency, especially in the fall of 2001 and the spring of 2002, that they don't quite understand, they don't understand that once you do that, everybody, in this case, the Taliban and whatever resistance organizations, they're going to scatter to the winds because your regular forces don't stand and fight. Yeah. That's what conventional forces do. The regular forces scatter and they stay alive to fight another day.

And that's what happened there. Yeah. And whatever regular Taliban army divisions got bombed pretty quickly and everybody scattered after that. Well, they never had divisions. They had battalion minuses maybe, but they discovered after that that they were. would never have mass formations like that because they simply didn't have the advantage on the chess board because once they're located and clustered in, let's say, a company is about 120 men, platoon's about 40, a battalion's about 600 to 800. Once you cluster them and you're fighting

a first world country like the United States where its allies and coalition forces, they have considerable air power, artillery power, indirect firepower to destroy them en masse. And they got smart about that and knew it yeah yeah okay so i mean on tour board specifically though and this is look i'm very suspicious because you got you know the national security council meeting notes where they make it pretty clear that they don't want to try to get bin laden they prefer that he get away so that they can make it clear to the american people that oh no no we haven't won yet we got a whole bunch of wars still to fight in the long-term future here um but it you know the one thing i learned was because i have always kind of conceded that look it's true that they did bomb the crap out of

torpora and including dropped at least one daisy cutter although i believe the delta guys said it was a pretty disappointing boom when they did um that's the you know 15 000 pound bomb i guess um conventional bomb but they missed they didn't get it and then one thing I finally learned I guess I had never been smart enough to ask this before but I guess after

the Americas withdrew from Afghanistan there was a piece in task and purpose by the Air Force Special Operations ground controller and he told the story about how you know for people who are not familiar even though they knew that bin Laden's hideout the lion's den

was there at Torabora all along CBS and CNN and the Independent, everybody had been there to interview Bin Laden before they didn't go there until the beginning of December, very end of November, very beginning of December

I guess. And so this Air Force Special Operations controller is embedded with them and he's telling the story of how there had been a friendly fire accident somewhere else in the country. And so

all Air Force operations were suspended for a week until they could get their chain of command together or something. That doesn't surprise me and remember it. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Hang on, hang on. So that happened elsewhere. So that was except that Torbora, because I guess

it was high enough priority. So this Air Force controller then, he had every plane in Afghanistan, American and British, at his disposal. They were banned from doing any other missions. So they all went to Nangahar. And this one guy, is doing air traffic control and bombing runs all by himself for everybody from the ground.

And he's bombing the crap out of him. And then here's the point of my anecdote. And then they pulled me out of there on December the 8th. Wait, what? On December the 8th? But Osama bin Laden didn't get away until the 17th. And I don't remember from Bernson or Greer whether they had mentioned that part of the anecdote before, that all the air power was.

was pulled out of there after eight days. And it was another nine days before the Arabs got away into Pakistan. We're never mind the fact then that the Delta Force was not allowed to chase them, even though they had plans to do so and were raring to go according to Greer. And in fact, where we know that the CIA had prepared the Pakistanis, their frontier corps and army to expect the Delta Force and CIA paramilitaries to chase the al-Qaeda paramilitaries to chase the al-Qaeda. across the border, and so had already set up deconfliction to make sure to protect from friendly fire.

And then, but they treated the Pakistani border into a friendly country under American total domination at that point, as though it was this semi-permeable membrane, and only al-Qaeda could cross, but Delta Force never could. So that, to me, you know, I think of that. And it sounds like you know a lot more about it because you're like, no, the 10th Division came in and told Mahal and this and that, so you know a lot more the detail, like firsthand it sounds like, or second-hand at least. about what went on here, but the way it looks to me is about as suspicious as it could possibly be that the word went down, if not, because, you know, Greer and Burns and both are kind of coy and go, geez, we just couldn't figure out why they wouldn't let us have, when we had

4,000 Rangers at Bogram, we got at least hundreds of special forces at Missouri Sharif, we got 4,000 Marines and the 82nd Airborne. down in Kandahar, but nobody's allowed to come to Delta Forces Aid when they got Osama bin Laden quartered right at an international border. And they got him surrounded on three sides. You know, and what the hell, man? Sounds to me, it's almost like, you know, I used to joke about people say that al-Qaeda is all just a CIA front and whatever. How about the CIA is an al-Qaeda front? And it looks to me like W. Bush and those guys were serving bin Laden's interest more than anybody else's in that case, you know?

Well, here's what I have to say about that, is that I assign, don't assign malevolence where it may very well be incompetence. And don't think that the DOD is immune to incompetence, analysis, paralysis, bad leadership, and that kind of thing. There was a lot of bad leadership at the Pentagon at that time. I do know that that's true. I'm certain of it. And so as far as the specifics of what you're saying,

I know, for instance, there were not 4,000 Rangers down there because there aren't 4,000 Rangers in the U.S. Army. No, no, no, it was supposedly it was 4,000 Marines under Mattis down in Kandahar. But it was, you know, there were a couple thousand rangers or at least hundreds of rangers at Bodrum already. And I want you to take something else. And Bogram's a helicopter right away from there, man. A few hundred Rangers would have come in real handy. You're never going to have a few hundred Rangers going to one objective. Ain't going to happen for a variety of reasons.

But I don't want to bore your listeners with that. Even to get Osama bin Laden and I'm an Al-Aliari. We're going to fight a 20-year war. We're going to kill almost a million people probably. We're going to lose 2,500 of our guys eventually. But we're not willing to risk a couple of Rangers and Delta guys against the guy that just slaughtered 3,000 people, which at that time, I think they hadn't even. settled for 3,000 yet. I think at that time, you know, at the, well, no, I guess by December,

yeah, by that time people knew it's 3,000, but still, that's a hell of a lot of dead civilians. And you think about the emotional state of the American people at the time, the lack of effort compared to the determination that the people responsible should be held accountable. You know, the ratio there is pretty off the charts, man, big army bureaucracy or not, you know? Yeah. But you know what? You got to know the ground truth of what? like to fight in the foothills of the Himalayas and fighting at altitudes that can exceed 10 to 12,000 feet. And you don't have vehicles. You don't have any of that. You're, you're rucking and humping through there and conducting kinetic operations. Special forces guys,

Delta guys, they're not Superman. They're very fit. They're very smart. They're very best of the best. There's no doubt on my mind. But they are fighting against antagonists who have been there since the day they were born, who have lived lives of privation, who didn't hump everything that they did, and had just finished fighting a war, in this case, if they had been fighting against the Taliban, or in the other case, in the 1980s, I mean, these indigenous people are going back generations fighting in the foothills of Himalayas against invaders. I mean, but a lot of them were just Arabs from Saudi, you know, from Egypt and Saudi, some of them from Cairo.

I don't know nothing about hump and nothing. They're not special operations, anything, right? They're politicians. But you're right, but there aren't many special operations, Afghan Indigs. That's not what they do. Now, one could say there's a flavor of special operations because they're irregular warfare operators,

but they don't have access to the training pipelines, the logistics, the aircraft, the availability of indirect fires and stuff that makes American and, Western soft, relatively effective. But I say relatively effective because all these great chess pieces here, in this case, the soft forces, who's running them? They're not the smartest people in the room. McChrystal, Petraeus, all the rest of them make themselves out. And the media makes themselves out to be these absolute strategic geniuses. And it turns out that in the

end, they're not, are they? Okay, but Bill, so tell me this, though. Like if you know enough about it to say it was, you know, not Mulholl and it was this other guy who did this on this day. Look for a 10th Mountain Division commander. Okay. I mean, I believe you in whatever, but I'm just saying, so if you know that much about it, do you know can you like report to us

on the spirit of the order at the time? Was it clear that George W. Bush said, we better find them Arabs. Wherever they are, any Arab fighters in Afghanistan, they're not going to get away. We're going to find them. We're to get them because the president says you better or was the command you know what we should do

let's do regime change in Kabul and let's screw around in missouri shirif and kandahar and let's in fact not target the a rabs at all but instead let's go after the posh tunes and let's go after this long-term future in afghanistan let's spend all our rangers doing everything except fighting against the actual guilty enemy because it seems pretty black and white it's got to be one way or the other whether the guys on the ground really felt like oh man Bush is after us to get this job done

or whether they knew that no no he's not and we better not try too hard you know this is a government job dude we're not trying to finish it everybody on the ground was cynical about any political political leadership in the United States whatever the party is I'm a non-voter. I'm not a member of a of a political party.

Yeah, no, but I'm just asking about whether, no, no, no, no, never mind that. I'm just saying, was the idea that Bush wants these people dead or by these people, did he mean the Taliban or Al-Qaeda? Because you know what I mean? It's not the same damn thing. And I know that they were lying to everybody in my neighborhood and trying to make everyone in my neighborhood think that the Taliban did it. But I know that they know there's a difference between a bunch of Saudis and Yemenis and Egyptians hiding at Torah Bora, by a bunch, I mean a couple of hundred compared to this Pashtun Taliban regime that rules Kabul and their armed forces around the country, which we're not even necessarily dedicated to defending the Arabs at all. So that's what I'm curious about is whether the people on the ground got the idea that Bush really wants us to get the al-Qaeda guy. or whether they got the idea that Bush doesn't want that. Bush wants us to go after Mullah Omar's men instead. I'm here to tell you that in the fall of 2001,

no one on the ground and in the IC drew a distinction between Taliban and Al Qaeda. Because here's what they said. They said that if the Taliban were willing to host al-Qaeda and allow them to attack our homeland, we will categorize them as one and the same. And that's what was going on. Yeah. But see, that's sophistry.

I mean, we know that from the Bob Woodward book where Connoisse Rice and the CIA say, no, we should only bomb al-Qaeda as best we can and not the Taliban and demonstrate to the Taliban that we really don't want to pick this fight with you. We really are trying to discriminate between al-Qaeda and the Taliban. And Rumsfeld and Cheney and Bush said, no, no, no, we got to go after them all together. But that, of course, means what that mean? That means going after the Taliban instead to a great degree because it means instead of sending special forces and the Marines everybody to Nangahar, it means sending them everywhere all over the country, you know? And by the way, I like this anecdote. It's an important anecdote, I think, that Gary Bernson reports that he got on the line. He had a militia, Northern Alliance militia that he was leading, the CIA guy on the ground.

And he got on the line with a Taliban commander who said, listen, I want to surrender to your. you know, far inferior forces here because I'm, I guess, afraid of your air power. So, let me surrender to you, please. And Bernson said, do you have any Arabs with you? And he said, yeah, I do. I got about 20 Arabs. And Bernson says, kill him. And he says, copy that. And he, and then you can hear rat, tat, tat, tat, tat, because he lined up all his Arabs and betrayed him and killed them. And he goes, okay, now can I surrender to you? And Bernson says, okay. So that was the, that was the spirit of the Taliban at the time was you can have these Egyptians, man, just don't kill me.

And the Americans didn't want to exploit that. They wanted to do a bait and switch. Anyway, I'm done ranting at you, but that's sure. No, that's okay. So we have a gentleman's disagreement because I'm convinced that the I see at the time, there may have been some smart members, but no one made that distinction. And making that distinction after the fact for history is one thing. But on the ground at the time, that was not ground truth.

Well, by I see, you mean CIA. I mean, in the Woodward. I mean, all the intelligence community. Yeah. I mean, in the Woodward book, it's Tenet and Rice. In the Woodward book, it's Tenet and Rice on the National Security Council. And this isn't from interviews later. This is from the notes taken by the National Security Council notekeepers who then

W. Bush told them, go ahead and give it all to Woodward. We like him. And so he's got the direct quotations of them talking about this, where it's the CIA who are saying we really should focus on the Arabs. And it's really the higher level cabinet officials Cheney and Bush and Rumsfeld who are saying, no, we want a big war here, not a little one, you know. And the Arabs in this case, as you refer to them, and I think you're putting that in air quotes, that would be all the foreign fighters who had flocked there because you had Syrians, you had North Africans, you had, you know, every manner of under this moniker of Arabs, that was a third force in addition to al-Qaeda and Taliban, because during the 1990s, plenty of foreign fighters came to embrace the Taliban's official fundamentalist ideology that they had, religious-wise. Yeah. Well, you know, I'm writing this book about... It wasn't simply isolated to al-Qaeda. Yeah, I'm writing this book about the Cold War now. And I had mentioned this in my... Enough

already, and I guess in Fools Heron, too. But now I have whole sections on American support for the bin Ladenites in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Chechnya, to incredible degrees. And right leading up to 9-11, too. Yep. Yep. There's no doubt in my mind that all that is true. But again, all I'm saying, Scott, is that when we try... try to, and I'm using the word conspiracy here in the loosest sense, when we try to connect conspiracist notes and act as if the government is doing things intentionally in an evil fashion that they've got all the dots connect and such, I really think that incompetence overrules everything that they do. And if anything gives me hope that that is true, as you alluded to earlier in our interview today, everything they got,

no one out there in your audience can name a single thing the government does better than the private sector. There's not a single thing. And there's not a single thing the government, if they get involved in it, whether it's the DEA or the EPA or the DOD, gets involved in where they don't make things worse than they were. Although, look, I mean, a lot of this is just a matter of category errors

or what have you, right? I mean, if the idea is that, Donald Rumsfeld would never make a cynical decision, only a forthright but mistaken one. We know that that's not right. The degree, if you go, well, yeah, but did he make that bad decision in the presence of the head patriarch of the skull and bones? Well, no, probably not. If that's what it takes to make it a conspiracy. But if Rumsfeld said, you know, I think it'd be better if bin Laden got away.

That's politics. man, that's doable. And we know, wait a minute, we know from the day, from before the sun went down on September 11th, Donald Rumsfeld said to Stephen Cambone, we should hit Iraq now, hit Saddam Hussein now, hit targets related and not, sweep it all up and get me Paul Wolfowitz to make the connection to Iraq because he knew that Paul Wolfowitz was shoveling the conspiracy theory that Saddam, Don Hussein was the real power behind al-Qaeda and the First World Trade Center bombing, et cetera. And that was, before the sun even went down, before they even knew 9-11 was over, he was saying, so how's that for

conspiracy? You know what I mean? Let no Sama escape is nothing compared to that. You read Mazar's book, right, Leap of Faith? No, whose book? Michael Mazar, Leap of Faith, hubris negligence in America's greatest foreign policy tragedy. No, sounds good. about the lead up to the Iraq war. And all it does is it emphasizes a hundred times over what

you just said that on September 12th, Bush said, this is it. Now, I'm paraphrasing here. This is it. This is my causes spell. I remember he comes up with 22 causes belli by 2003 to invade Iraq. But like you're saying, September 12th, 2001, he is trying to find the means to invalibaba. beta rock. Yeah. I mean, in Robsfeld, even on September 11th, we have the notes. I mean, you can see the picture in Cambone's handwriting. Yeah. So Leap of Faith covers this in detail, the very thing that you're talking about. So, and this goes to one of the tangents kind of we went on, before we went on a different one, was whether this is a thing of the past, they're doing drone

strikes in Somalia, and I know they're going to switch sides again in Yemen, and that's going to be a huge problem. But, and Eritrean, Ethiopia, yes. Oh, yeah. Well, Yemen. Hold that one. Hold the Ethiopia for a minute. But overall, in the idea now that they want to not do counterinsurgences, they want to do anti-insurgencies, as Flynn would call them, right? They want to do assassinations and targeted killings, drone strikes, and murders. But they don't want to try this kind of coin, which, you know, for people not really, you know, familiar, the idea would be you put in all these infantry to become kind of. to traffic cops and provide security, make a wonderful place for people to live.

And then they'll choose your side against their own fathers and brothers and sons and this kind of. They're not trying that in Somalia, right? They're just helping the government that they installed, you know, try to assassinate insurgent leaders in the same old like terror war fashion. But so I guess, in other words, I'm curious whether you think that, no, this is a real problem because we could find ourselves very soon again trying to not just knock off a government but try to occupy and remake a nation the way that they did try in Iraq and Afghanistan. That these ideas, as you said, you and your buddies are still very few and that the consensus inside the military is if they got another crack at it in just the right spot, they really think that they could do it

and that, you know, this is an ongoing problem as their belief in themselves on this. Oh, the belief in counterinsurgency as a positive military means to make regime change or nation building, whatever you fill in the blank with, that hasn't died. That's still there. And they'll look for another place to park a deep state death star over that country. I mean, you've done a great job of covering Yemen. The media in America does not do a good job of covering Yemen and what's going on there. You talk about a Holocaust. What America and its allies and the Saudis have been doing in Yemen in so many ways across so many things that are happening in that theater. These are crimes against humanity writ large, but no one pays attention

to it. So I think that's part of the cover that the DoD and the Pentagon has, is they know that when they conduct counterinsurgency, whether it's in an aloof fashion like you're talking about with drones and assassination, or much more hands-on and en masse, where you actually put boots on the ground and enforce it with a military dictatorship, these notions are still popular across the board. I mean, there's a reason Small Wars Journal or the irregular warfare part of the Modern War Institute of West Point would never invite me to speak. Yeah. I mean, that really goes to show their cowardice. I've heard this so many times that, no, the army really takes pride in hearing dissenting opinions and they do not. Reading different books and

I know. You know, McGregor told me that he had recommended to the Army War College that they, you know, stock and, you know, add fools there and to the curriculum there, which is, wow, that's pretty nice. And, but he's, I think he told me, I don't think they did. Oh, and they should. And they should. Of course they should. But they don't have, they don't really have any interest in hearing. Because, I mean, the idea is, right, lives are on the line. These are my guys that we're sending out there into battle. There's some good critical stuff. They pride themselves in a certain meathead intellectualism, right? No, no, you're right.

And, you know, you'd think that America would adopt what I call the Prussian culture of disobedience, which from 1905 to 1945 informed the Vermat in the way they did their business, where the Vermacht take it for what it was and what it could succeed at and the awful things that they did do. They did something really interesting with the way they conducted warfare, and that's that if you're the company commander, not only do you know the commander's intent four levels up, but if all four levels up from you are die in combat or a wounded combat, and the leadership, as a company commander, 120 men, falls to you for a division or maybe a regiment, let's call the regiment of 2,600 men, and the leadership falls to you. you could do that because you know the intent and they trusted those who are at the bleeding edge to take the decisions that may depart from the plan so that the fiction and friction and fog of war wouldn't put you in paralysis or a leadership dungeon and you could conduct yourself America they give lip service to that kind of thing they don't do that at all it's

called mission command the german word is alfragettic which means that the the guy at the Front is the one who can make the very best assessment of how to conduct the battle at that very point, in spite of it may be going 180 degrees out from the plan. For instance, can you imagine an American army that would allow an Ord Wingate, a T.E. Lawrence, a Michael Collins, or somebody like, you know, the British with their eccentric's Sterling or Patty Main or such. Can you imagine them having them in their forces? It wouldn't happen, especially after 1945 because the U.S. Army, among all the services, despises unorthodox and eccentric personalities who drive against the wedge of what they want everybody to be like. Remember, to become a

flag officer in any service in the United States, you have to have a perfect officer efficiency report rating. Perfect. You can't have one slip up, which imagine over a career of 20, 25 years, makes you risk averse. So we have this breed of officers at the flag officer level who are much more political, much more risk averse, and much less, I guess, talented in the martial ways. All right, let me ask you about Vietnam, because everybody knows that we were about to win that war

before the liberal Sissy media ruined it. No, no, what it was is Westmoreland said, search and destroy find the bad guys and kill him well that was a stupid meathead thing to do everybody knows that but then they brought in this brilliant guy uh crayton abrams wasn't that his first name that was his name his father was a world war two commander there you go and they named a tank after him and everything and he was brilliant and smart and he was doing the right thing with the clearing and the holding and the building and the counterinsurgencying of the people of south vietnam who began to see us finally as liberators and and saviors of them

from communist slavery, and then the Democrats forced the Republicans to end the war and stabbed everybody in the back. And so now, unfortunately, well, then, unfortunately, it led to this terrible Vietnam syndrome and reluctance of the American people to want to have more wars for a little while. And so, you know, I don't know, man, I'm interested in your take on that. maybe there is some truth to it. On the surface, just like I know in the case of Afghanistan, the previous strategy was not working. So it's easy for Mike Flynn to say, yeah, but that's why we got to do my strategy now instead. Now, I never bought the idea that his strategy was better, but at least it was based on the premise that what we're doing now is not right. So there's

clearly, you know, at least a valid, if not sound narrative there. So take it from there, Bill. What's the truth? So the truth is that when you support a corrupt political class whose loyalty to that political class over military competence lets you have your South Vietnamese flag officers and field officers, that's how they're vetted. They're not vetted for their military competence. They're vetted for what their family connections are and their political loyalty in South Vietnam. Now, one thing I didn't cover, but I have to as a preamble to my thoughts on this. And that's, there's three legs to an insurgency that makes it successful. It's going to be grievances, real or perceived, legitimacy of said insurgency and narrative.

Now, those three things are expanded upon by this person I found named Chris Mason, who talked about these national parameters. And Chris Mason talked about these national parameters, and he put them against Vietnam in a graph. And it reads, national identity. Was there a national identity for the Vietnamese between the South Vietnamese and North Vietnamese? There was not. If you don't have that cohesiveness, it's going to lead things astray. He also talked about government legitimacy. Was the government legitimate in the eyes of the South Vietnamese, much less the North Vietnamese. To the North Vietnamese, the South Vietnamese government was not legitimate. To the South Vietnamese,

there were huge swaths of illegitimacy caused by the corruption and ranking competence of the political elites starting with the 1960s where, well, it probably goes back further under the French too, because I think part of that political corruption was bred by the French, but the Americans step into it between 1958 and 1964, and the political dross and evil people that they supported down there in South Vietnam, again, it begs the question of that legitimacy. And population security, did the population in South Vietnam feel as if the military and constabulary forces in South Vietnam, Vietnam, provided them not only protection from North Vietnamese predations, but predations by the

government itself, the answer is no. And then you have existing security forces, again, corrupt. And then you have external sanctuary, Laos, Cambodia, all the rest, that provided the the North Vietnamese with the means to render this war against the South Vietnamese a sure thing over time. So my short answer to this question is that there was no possible way to conventionally or unconventionally bring in Western forces into an eastern country, in this case, on the land mass of Asia, and when impossible. Over. Yeah. Well, and it seems so obvious, too, that, I mean, I don't know if If there's exact quotes like this, there must be, right? Where Ho Chi Minh had said, I don't give a damn how many of us you'd kill.

The ones left alive still aren't ever going to surrender to you. So get used to getting shot by us because we're still coming. There's nothing you can do to stop it. And I don't even know the degree of control that he had over the Viet Cong the whole time, but he didn't really need to control them. They were going to keep coming, just like we're talking about. The more the Americans are fighting the VC, the more VC they've got to fight.

Well, what's interesting about Vietnam, too, is it's one of those rare occurrences in an irregular fight where the conventional forces join hands with the irregular forces, and eventually the conventional forces overwhelm this country, in this case, the demarcation line. In other words, never mind Laos and Cambodia, the VC have safe haven in North Vietnam. Oh, oh, absolutely. There's no doubt. And, you know, Ho Chi Men, do you know when the first American, soldier died in Vietnam? Oh, no, but I bet it's in the 40s.

It is. And you're right. In 1945, it was an OSS officer, who I think was assassinated by the communists. Even though Ho Chi Men, and maybe he was doing this in the way that Castro was, I'm not read in enough on it to know whether this was a political machination,

but he was putting feelers out to the Americans to help him liberate his country from the French colonialism. 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. They're all so good, I swear. And for a limited time, Tennessee hot sauce company is featuring official Scott Horton hotter than the sun thermonuclear hot sauce.

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Check out this incredible piece of art at Rick Casali.com slash Ron Paul, and you'll see what I mean. Use promo code Horton, and you'll save 25 bucks, and this show will get a little kickback, too. That's Rick Casale.com slash Ron Paul. Casali is C-A-S-A-L-I, Rick Casali.com slash Ron Paul. And there's free shipping, too. Yeah, I mean, I learned this in high school that, you know, you know, He originally had signed a Declaration of Independence against the French that was copied from Thomas Jefferson because he was trying to make an impression on the Americans. Thomas Paine wrote a great document in the D.I.

You know, there is a book that I haven't read yet that I'm sure is great by my friend Mike Swanson, Why Vietnam, where he's gone through all these documents showing how we got into that thing. that I'm sure is a wonderful companion to Gareth Porter's book on all that too. You know what really strikes me about Vietnam as Mili? What really encapsulates that entire conflict is what happened at Mili. And I just read a terrific book, and I forget the title.

I think I have it at work, but I will send it to you where the sky goes back to both Vietnamese sources and English sources and American sources. And he forensically takes that thing apart. Do you know who the 156 investigator was for Mili, which is the investigation report Oh, Colin Powell? It was Colin Powell. And I think that had an impact. Great anti-government trivia. Yeah, of course, this is how he made his career, you know? Yeah, yeah. So I think, I think Mili really encapsulates in a very vicious and morbid way why we would ultimately

fail there. Listen, have you read, I'm sure you have, I hear the way you talk about all these books on your show, The Kill Everything That Moves by Nick Turs. I did, and it's part of the American Empire Project. I liked it, but I was, I had to be a little suspicious because of his political etymology, which I'm always suspicious about. Fair enough, but I'm pretty sure his only sources are Army investigations, right? Okay, okay.

That's all he's doing is he's going through the files from the Army investigations of their own war crimes. Because I have no doubt what he described was correct. And I also have no doubt that whatever number they come up with, I'll bet that number could be double. Of total casualties in the war? Yeah, because it was just awful. Oh, my God.

Same thing in Iraq, you name it. I mean, in the official number, 3 million? It is. Yeah. Well, that's the official number that kill everything that moves, quotes. Yeah. Yeah. And I've always heard three to five if you throw in lots in Cambodia, you know. But nobody really knows. They always say three to five because nobody really knows. And again, Scott, remember what I talked about at the beginning of the interview where I said decanting conflicts where you take this Pandora's box and you open it up and you have this big worldwide conflict and then all the conflicts that emerged because all these people who have been in a Cold War with each other for decades, if not centuries, once this war,

cooks off, they say, okay, gloves are off. This is my opportunity. And that's where you have the Polish slaughtering Jews. It's where you have the Forrest Brothers in the Baltic Nations. I think the last Forrest Brother to surrender to the Soviet Union in the Baltic Nations was in 1982. Wow, really? Yeah. Yeah, he'd been fighting as a guerrilla since the end of World War II. And of course, you know, World War II, most people think it ends in 1945. It's sort of hard to put it there because of all the decanting and uncorking and Pandora's box opening of all these other conflicts that took place. Yes, yes. Yeah.

And one thing, have you done an interview with an expert on color revolutions? I've done a few over the years. And I'm writing a book about one about them right now. I mean, the book I'm writing right now is already over 500 pages, so it has everything in there. So, yeah, it's got... Well, more books from Serbia and Georgia and Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. Because we started this color revolution business under Western sponsorship of the 1980s in the Philippines. And it is a part of irregular warfare, but it's one that I haven't examined in the detail that I...

Wait, wait, wait, you're saying the Aquino Revolution was an NED thing against Marcos? Absolutely. Wow. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. Well, that's my contention, and I'm happy for people to say otherwise. But I think there were reasons that they wanted to do that. Because as you see now, with the present Philippine construct, they are flirting with the Chinese for suzerainty. So who knows what's going to happen. So. But these color revolutions, I mean, somebody this morning said, well, I think a State Department spokesman said, the fight in Ukraine, in 2014. No, it didn't. Start in 2004. As a matter of fact, one could say, conservatively, it started in 1991. When NATO, despite their promises, I'll bet they were putting into place

their Eastern expansion. Yeah. In fact, well, I don't want to spoil it, but I'm just reporting to you with some other, some other guy found Joshua Schifrensen has shown, and I quote in the upcoming book, about how it wasn't just Bill Clinton, It was H.W. Bush and his men who knew good and well, their plan was to expand NATO, not the partnership for peace that was going to include Russia. They were going to expand NATO at Russia's expense, but we don't want to tell them that yet, kind of thing, you know, deceiving them from the beginning. Yeah. You've done such a good job historically of finding where the bodies are buried and finding all these association matrices of who put all these things in play. tends to be put in play far further back than anybody anticipated. Yeah. I mean, and that's the thing is they always will lie and say the war started, you know,

either in 2022 or as you say in 2014, but even in 2014, it started when the Russians invaded Crimea rather than, oh, it started when there was a violent revolution against democratically elected government by a bunch of right-wing street thugs backed by the United States of America. That they declared war against the people of the East who didn't want to accept their rule. Oh, that's a hell of an antecedent to truncate. Now that you bring that up, I got to tell you something that's really disturbed me about the Ukraine-Russian conflict. So I've been a conflict, I think you're the same as me.

You and I've been conflict observers, our entire adult life. And we have a fair bit of history and military history behind us to inform our lens. This is the first conflict in my lifetime, Scott, in which I have. I can't trust any of the data from either side or any side. Which, by the way, I don't know what's going on. I'm not exactly sure what you meant by that, but just to clarify, I've never been in the military. I just have been anti-government my whole life. But go ahead.

But anyhow, what I'm saying is that this is the first conflict in my lifetime after being an observer, like you, of all things global, where I can't trust any of the data to tell me the ground truth of the Ukraine or Russia and what's going on. Yeah, you know, I mean, it's just like with anything really is. You've got to take in as many different sources as you can and hold your horses and buy your time and wait and see. Absolutely. By and large, the war maps about who's moving how far on what terrain around which city in the east are probably accurate. You know what I mean? Like, wherever discrepancies you find can be reconciled over time about who's, you know, on the outskirts of which town and moving how far up, what highway and all that.

But as far as what it all means, that's the part where, you know, it's much more, much more difficult to discern. I don't know of, well, it seems like, you know, a lot of people kind of have, as you're talking about before, their biases that they don't want to let go of. So on one hand, you have, you know, people who are just absolutely sure that Ukraine is going to completely destroy the Russian military. forced them out of all of the east and maybe even Crimea and, you know, they've just, you know, everything is going their way that they're probably going to find out the hard way that that's not so. And that in fact, you know, the Russians at the end of the day, they've got more artillery tubes and they've got more men and more tanks. And even though they're on foreign soil,

it's, I don't think it's an even match. It's, but on the other hand, I think it's a lot more even than a lot of people thought, I mean, from the hawk side and the, the anti-war side, who thought that the Russians would do much better in the war than they did right away. And so it's a hell of a slog. I mean, I don't think the plan was, you know, for it to take this long. You know, Daniel Davis did a great thing where he wrote up about just the strategic or the tactical or whatever you call operational error of invading from four different places at once the way that they did. And they didn't quite have enough power. to see any single offensive through and got stymied in all four areas, and then they've been

fighting a slog ever since. I mean, that's pretty foobar situation all the way around, it sounds like, you know. Historically, all the initial authors of war assume that it's just going to take days and it'll be over, with the exception of the Persian Gulf War, maybe a handful of others throughout the entirety of human history, it always takes much longer, and it always surprises the original antagonists in what they encounter. So, I mean, that's, this is just the way human beings work when it comes to warfare. Yeah.

And by the way, speaking of Mexico, America's invaded Mexico a bunch of times. I mean, not recently, but they never tried counterinsurgency there. I mean, they did. In fact, you look at what they did when they took Texas in the southwest. They just cleansed all the Hispanics and said, you can get the hell out and move sound. Courts won't recognize their property rights. Texas Rangers will come and shoot you. The Comanche's helped him with that, too.

Yeah, that's true. So there was no counterinsurgency campaign. It was just an ethnic cleansing campaign, and it's being reversed, some have noticed. But, I mean, what was the boldest attempt of the Americans to remake Mexico? Would that have been Woodrow Wilson? No, I think it was certainly, you know, 1846 to 1848.

Well, just take in the northern half of it, or they... Exactly. I mean, that's the most bold strike. But as far as in the early aughts of the 20th century, it was semi-organized banditry coming up from Mexican sanctuaries into U.S. proper to do raiding and stuff like that. That's what that response was, but it certainly, yeah, and it wasn't even though I bet he would have wanted to. Yeah. He's probably one of the most evil human beings that has ever inhabited that office. And I've got to put out a shout out to Prof. C.J., who has done an almost 30-hour overview of Woodrow Wilson on a dangerous history podcast.

Yeah, he sent that to me, and I told him, man, I'm sorry, remind me about this when the book is done. But I'm not going off on this tangent now. There's just no way I can. It is splendid. But that's really great. I'm sure that he did a great job. And, you know, for people who, I'm sure a lot of people look at us like we're crazy the way we talk about Woodrow Wilson, but, you know, there are so many things to pick a part about that man. He was just, he was an epic malefactor. I mean, apart from his government supremacism, just his view of the races was just poisonous. Oh, yeah.

No, the guy was an absolutely monster. You know, I remember in like 1994 or something, there was an outdoor sale at half-priced books. on the drag in Austin and I put my hand on Woodrow Wilson my own story which I don't think I ever have read I think I still have it

by Woodrow Wilson I put my hand on it and this lady who is like this liberal Democrat University of Texas assistant professor type or whatever you know is oh no I wanted that

you have it oh man I'm like sorry lady I'm getting it like oh the vile evil Woodrow Wilson oh how I'm I hate him. I want to read this book. And she said, oh no, Woodrow Wilson was the best. He was an idealist. He just wanted the best. And I thought, you know what? That actually is what they taught me in seventh grade. This was the guy. He was a teacher from school, man. He wasn't a politician, and he had all these great ideas. He wanted to build a one world navy, and its only job would be

to keep the peace, Bill. I wanted to offer you a clarification. I know you're using the word politician on purpose. I got it. But if you substitute the true meaning of the word violence broker and you use that whenever you come across it, it becomes much more clear on why they do what they do. Violence broker. I like that. That's what I call them. Yep. Very good. And look, for people who want the the shorter version than CJ's podcast, it sounds like, read Wilson's War by James Powell. Yes. And that shows how You know, you talk about the world war being one big world war between the two of them. Yeah.

It's American intervention is what sealed that fate right there. I don't think it would have happened that way at all. And Powell also did FDR's Folly, which is a great follow-on to that. Oh, that's great. You know, I don't think I've ever had a chance to get my hands on that one. I get a big pile of books I'd like to read. I'd tell you what. I can imagine.

Yeah. So many books, so little time. Yeah, man. All right. So listen, I'm trying to think like a hawk of any counter examples where like, oh, you're all wet because it totally worked this one time in this one area. But again, what we're talking about is not just a major power defeating a weaker insurgency, but like co-opting them and clearing and holding and building and remaking another country into the kind of country that wants your military to stay there and be its friend now.

I mean, I think even Germany, after the Second World War, I mean, first of all, they were bombed to hell and exhausted, although it's still a big country, but it was only half of it. And they had the Soviet Union hanging over their head in the Western half. And so, and the Americans were willing to overlook a lot of, you know, they denotified, like the debaithification, but they kind of renazified too, you know, in West Germany. Well, there are two cases I'm going to examine. So they didn't have to fight a counter-insurgency there. It was just a political one. The war was over, and the Germans basically accepted it in that case, right? Yeah.

The two cases that may defeat my thesis of totality in counter-insurgency being so ineffective would be Planned Columbia, and I'm still investigating that and haven't come to a conclusion, and what happened to Sri Lanka. Oh, okay. Well, first of all, you mean Joe Biden's Plan Colombia. right well this goes back decades okay plan Colombia so well but Joe Biden goes back decades does plan Colombia go back to before Biden I don't think so okay I mean Biden first joined the Senate in 73 yeah did you know his first act as a senator was to condemn Richard Nixon for his

hasty and precipitous withdrawal from Vietnam I did not know that yeah man it's a Bronco March teach in his book yesterday's man amazing the first thing is that incredible or what it is um okay but so um now in sri lanka i don't know the entire time period or of uh what you're mentioning there hindus and buddhists fighting each other for decades yeah so i there's a horseshoe tamio republic that surrounds the island of uh of srolanka which was was once known as Salon, and Arthur C. Clarke once lived there, the science fiction author. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah.

So I know that I read Viktor Ostrowski by way of deception. You ever read that? I bet you have. I have. Yeah, about the Mossad. And he talks about the Israelis arming both sides of the fight there for years and, like, we'll give you these new boats, and then we'll give you these new anti-boat missiles and all this kind of stuff back and forth. and, oh, and then the IMF gangsterism where they get all this money and they do a little Potemkin Dam project that is really just cover for the cleansing of these people from their lush fertile farmland to the barren plane and this kind of crap.

I mean, look at the fertilizer crisis that just occurred in Sri Lanka, and I did not know this, but the prime minister of Sri Lanka, as far as I've discovered, was an American citizen in 2019 or 2018. Oh, really? I did not know that. This goes into all this global economic forum cut back on fertilizer stuff. Indeed, where they said organic farming only, and it's been a disaster of biblical proportions for Sri Lanka. It's unbelievable that they would even do that. And then the other thing I know about them is from Robert Pape, that the Tamil tigers, who I always get this confused, man, see if I got this right. It's the, well, you said it before, it's the, the Tamils are.

Buddhist. Yeah, they're the Buddhists versus the Hindus. The Hindus over there. And then, but in the, but the, but the Tamils are also Marxists, right? Or is it the other side that are the Marxists? Well, I mean, who isn't today? Yeah, who know? Yeah, exactly. As Mesa said, you're all a bunch of socialist. Robert, you just mentioned Robert Pape, please. Well, yeah, Dying to win and cutting the fuse. And Robert Pape writes a book that's a Jeremiah against strategic bombing before he writes those two. Oh, right. That's true.

But wait, on this one, he says that the Tamil Tigers were the leading force in suicide bombing from 1980 through 2003. Who include boats, by the way. And I'm sorry? To include boats. Oh, okay. Suicide boats. Oh, I didn't realize that. And then also including killing.

Gandhi's widow, right, with a suicide attack? I'm not aware of that, but I wouldn't put a... Oh, man, it's on video. I think it's Gandhi's widow. It's some lady Gandhi. And, yeah, it's a girl. It's a female, it's a young girl who I think herself was a widow

of a guy who was killed who does a suicide bombing and blows up the president or the prime minister of India. I am not worthy of the encyclopedic knowledge you bring to everything, Scott. well i was interested in that subject for a little bit um the uh uh oh yeah so i mean this is a huge

thing right in terms of pap's thesis that look man you have to understand suicide bombing is not about islam and he said that he thought it was because it makes sense that look man you're going to go to paradise i i need you to believe really really really hard in heaven right now after you kill those people by blowing yourself up everything is going to be so cool and Right. So making people believe that before you send them off to do a suicide attack, it seems important. And then Pape says, nah, and you know how I know it? It ain't because I crunch the numbers. And the numbers are that suicide attackers are from countries that are being occupied by foreign powers. And the more foreign, the more suicide attacks. And that not in every case where there's a foreign occupation, will there be suicide attacks? But in every case where there's suicide attacks, there's a or an occupation, and that's what causes it in the Tamil Tigers in our exhibit A, that nobody's Muslim here. These are a bunch of Marxist, atheist, Buddhists fighting against a bunch of Hindus. And Muhammad is nowhere to be seen, and yet you got people strapped with explosives

blowing themselves up for their chance to just kill one or two other people as part of a strategic campaign against their enemies. You're right, and I thought it was astonishing, because how often did we hear from the neoconservatives that if it's a suicide bomber or a homicide bomber, however you want to characterize it, that they're hopped up on drugs, they come from broken families and all this. No, the bottom line is they're fighting against a foreign invasion. That's what they're doing. Yeah, it seems pretty obvious. I mean, even when you take the kamikazis, that was the last ditch effort to prevent American invasion of the homeland. Sure. You know, they go, I remember even as a kid being told, well, they're so brave, you know, like the emperor here, he's so, you know, like the emperor

Hirohito, he's Charlie Manson, and they're so brainwashed into worshiping their emperor that they would just give their lives for the emperor. Like, no, these men all had wives and children back home. That's why they were doing it, which is some crazy shit. Have you ever seen? I know you have, but for people in the audience, you've never seen the footage of the kamikaze attacks on the American fleet in the Pacific. It's incredible to see what these guys were doing there.

But nobody thought that it was Mahamas. Ahmed that got him and made him do it, you know, this is a strategy in war, simple as that. Well, it's a strategy of war, and there is a voluntary self-imilatia where an American GI jumps on a grenade. So is that a part of that could be at the outer edges? Well, and, you know, the history, I don't know my exact footnotes here, but they exist out there, was that the Jewish zealots. I forgot the name. I have it on the tip of my tongue. It's in the book. They had a special name for him that they would do essentially kamikaze attacks on Roman soldiers, walk up to three or four Roman soldiers and stab one of them to death, knowing that the other three are going to cut him down. But that was their way of fighting against the occupation. Call it extreme dedication. And, you know, same God, but earlier profit. it you know you bring up a great point because across religious lines across ethnic lines across racial lines whatever the case may be when foreign occupation occurs those militaries that

don't expect blowback are not paying attention right yeah yeah well speaking of which and now this is great power politics and not counterinsurgency but we're going to have a problem again with russia so bad from now on again it's a new cold war and that could lead to proxy wars like Ukraine all over the place. I think it's going to be a Sino-Russian alliance where the Indians can probably take a decision and go back into the Russian

fold. I don't know. I don't have the crystal ball, but there's certainly a Sino-Russian alliance that's cementing. Yeah. Man, well, I guess it's a good time to be in the war business. I don't know about the counter-insurgency business, but certainly if you're selling

or buying long range bombers or gigantic navy ships, then, you know, these are the boom times, huh? Well, yeah, I mentioned to you, too, in October, November, the irregular warfare functional collective or operation or something like that has been funded by the new national defense budget where they're going to sort of center up on a regular warfare and try to, maybe publish more manual. Who knows what will happen, but it is a discreet effort to identify and expand on a regular warfare efforts. As a matter of fact, I should cover that in a future episode.

And in Chasing Ghosts in a regular warfare podcast, you can find it on your favorite podcast vendor. I've got all my episodes scheduled out until March 2024 on a fortnightly basis, but stuff like this, I'll add that to it. So I think I've got probably a minimum of 100 episodes in me to do on this very arcane and esoteric subject. And listen, you know, speaking of Nick Terse, he has done some of the best work on SOCOM in Africa. And, you know, you can't go a day without hearing about the Wagner group, the Russian mercenary group. Yep. Fighting in Mali. And then, but you have to wonder, well, what's going on in Mali?

And, of course, what's going on in Mali is the consequences of Hillary and Obama's war in Libya in 2011, which I write about in the book, how the Libya war spread directly to Mali, and enough already. And then, as Turs has explained, you know, I mean, you got that Somalia thing that was at least sort of contained over there, its own catastrophe on the Horn of Africa. But then from Libya, the conflict spread down from Mali, but then to Chad and. Niger and Burkina Faso and Sierra Leone. And then eventually you had the Boko Haram down there, which were already their own problem in Nigeria, came up to Mali to meet with the Libyan jihadists and get some Korans and some rifles and, you know, some Saudi, some Saudi edit versions, you know. And so this is great, right? For Special Operations Command, if the Navy's got their whole, you know, work project in the Pacific, and the Army and the Air Force, well, the Air Force has both,

but the Army has their project in Europe, then Socom has still the war on terrorism. Wherever there's a Sunni with a rifle in a state where we're friendly with the government, then Socom has work to do, right? And that's, you know, we kind of overlooked that because we've got all this going on in Ukraine right now. But there's no limit to the missions that you can assign these guys in the northern half of Africa and more from now on, right? That's true. And once the West starts engaging in these African conflicts, all they're going to do is light brush fires because it's not going to solve anything.

It's not going to put out these ideological forest fires that are engulfing a lot of Africa to include South Africa, what's going on down there. because, I mean, to me, Western counterinsurgency efforts tend to be gasoline to an existing fire. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, and that's, I guess, really the future of it. And look, and this is one that, you know, for all of your guys to keep your eyes on, is in Yemen switching sides again. Because for the last, what, eight years now, have mercy.

America's been on the side of AQAP And, you know, in a war that, you know, first directly benefited them greatly as their own organization, then they went as a public relations compromise, they went and joined the UAE's militia, but they've been thriving and doing great for all of this time. And so, in fact, my next interview in just a few minutes is a guy who's talking about there's real progress on peace talks there where a bunch of middlemen have been cut out. And it's the Saudis talking directly with the Houthis now, without any counsel in between. That amazing. So it looks like some real progress being made, but that just means that we're going to switch sides back again. So from, you know, murderously failing to eliminate al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to the highest reason since Benedict Arnold, or at least since Obama in Syria, back in the al-Qaeda

guys there for all these years, that then now we're going to switch sides again. And we're going to have a bigger, better, worse al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula than ever before. And as, you know, Nasser Arabi, this reporter that I know and talked to from Sanaa, he goes, look, you know, in Syria and Iraq, we have this split between ISIS and al-Qaeda, where they fought over oil and now hate each other's guts and assassinate each other's leaders and these kind of things. You don't have that in Yemen. In Yemen, there are kind of ISIS factions as opposed to al-Qaeda factions, but they're not opposed to each other. They're just different, but they get along and fight side by side and, you know, I guess are all part of the Giants Brigade together. And so, I mean, even if just peace broke out all over Europe and Asia and Africa, we could still have a war on terrorism in Yemen that could be, you know, as bad as the last one was, which was horrifying. I mean, 2009 to 2015 was just the worst crisis already before they switched sides in the damn thing and made it 100.

times worse. So that's something to really keep an eye on and to oppose. What I find interesting, though, is I don't know whether we'll have Saudi permission to go after a foe that is not Shia. I mean, it depends on, I guess, in other words, it really does greatly depend on what the Americans want to do. I mean, there's, there, and in fact, we've seen demonstrated from time to time that there are people in the government who would rather kill Al-Qaeda guys than back them. And, you know, not that I'm on this guy's side at all, but Lloyd Austin, according to Mark Perry, he was really upset when Obama made him switch sides in the war. And he didn't resign over it. But he was like, are you kidding me, dude? Right now, we're back in the hoot these, giving them intel to kill

these guys. And now we're going to turn the whole thing around. And you know how much benefit this is going to take? And on some level, right, he's thinking, these are the guys that hit the Pentagon, man. These are the guys that tried to sink the coal. What the hell? He's the commander of Sancom. His job is killing bin Laden's men. Not taking their side just because these

other guys are friends with the Ayatollah or some crap. You know what I mean? You'd have to live in Washington, D.C. to believe that kind of thing. And so, you know, in fact, Perry says he even wrote an angry letter to Obama, and then his friends talked about us sending it.

So, because the show is the courage of his convictions there, but it does go to show his point of view that, like, if he just let him on autopilot, he would rather kill a bin Ladenite than a wannabe Hezbollah guy, you know? I, you know, what they don't understand is that every, in foreign policy, there are so many complexities because whether they like it or not, the international arena proves that anarchy works, whether they acknowledge that or not, because it is an anarchist landscape. and in anarchist landscapes, things happen that are multivariate. You know, you can't say that one linear line is going to lead to this because everything

becomes nonlinear in an anarchic landscape, so you don't know what the consequences are going to be until they hit you. Yeah. Well, we certainly get a lot of that. I mean, we can safely predict the worst, and then some variation of that will come true, I think it's fair. I think you're right, Scott. All right.

listen man i've had such a great time driving around listen to this podcast so far and for some reason i had in my head that you were only doing eight or ten of these or something and then i was surprised to see they keep coming and now i know that you're going to have a hundred so that's really great and i really hope that people who are interested in this stuff will dive in it's uh really great it's so may i may i flog my podcast very quickly well i was just going to say it's chasing ghosts in a regular warfare podcast with bill buper but you can now say whatever you want about it too so i have an podcast on Stoicism called The Dash, a Stoicism podcast, and my wife asked me, if you'll be so kind as to bear with me, she has a podcast called Touching the Tism about living with an autistic spouse. You can guess who that autistic spouse is. And anybody who wants to correspond with me, you can do that at cgpodcast. p.m.com.com. And Scott, it's always an honor to chat with you, and thanks for what you do. man uh you're very welcome thank you and i'm thinking i could probably use some stoicism maybe i

will check that out stoicism is the way all right all right you heard him everybody that's the great bill bea appreciate you man thank you out here the scott horton show anti war radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 fm in l a ps radio dot com antiwar dot com scott hortons dot org and libertarian institute.org