Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 4/18/24 Bill Buppert on the Threat of Terrorist Attacks after October 7 and the Changing Nature of Warfare

Episode Date: April 23, 2024

Scott interviews Bill Buppert, the new Smedley D. Butler Fellow for Military Affairs at the Libertarian Institute, about some of the topics he’s covered on his podcast, Chasing Ghosts. They discuss stoicism, Scott’s concern about a bin Ladenite terrorist attack happening in America, the ongoing slaughter in Gaza, the changing nature of warfare and more. Discussed on the show: Bridge of Spies (IMDb) Chasing Ghosts Episode 39 Stoicism: Who Dares Leads “A Military Solution to a Political Problem (Substack) Debate - Should U.S. Fund Ukraine War Again? Day of Wrath by William R. Forstchen The Attack by Kurt Schlichter Bill Buppert is the Smedley D. Butler Fellow for Military Affairs at the Libertarian Institute and host of Chasing Ghosts: An Irregular Warfare Podcast. He served in the military for nearly a quarter century and was a combat tourist in a number of neo-imperialist shit-pits planet-wide. He can be found on Twitter at @wbuppert and reached via email at [e-mail]. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; 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 the 5,500 interviews since 2000. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot four 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 y'all introducing bill bupert he is the host of the chasing ghosts podcast and he is the new smetley d butler fellow for military affairs at the The Libertarian Institute. How do you like that? Welcome back to the show. How are you doing, Bill? Oh, I'm doing great, and it is such an honor to become a fellow at the Libertarian Institute.

It's sort of like on my bucket list, and it's one of the things that's been achieved now. Cool. You know, I was just listening to your podcast where you were mentioning that you were a fellow at the Institute, and you seemed really pleased about it, and I was really pleased that you were mentioning it and thought that sounded great, and I think you're a perfect fit, and I had thought of it, of course, in the past, but I just thought, thought, why would the likes of you want to slum around with a guy like me and what we're doing here? So when you express interest in being part of what we're doing, then, of course, I jumped at the chance, and we're very honored to have you. And I think that's great that we got you named the Smedley D. Butler Fellow. You certainly deserve it. You know what? In fact, would you tell us a little bit about your background in the military and all that and your credentials from which you speak about all of these great issues that you talk about?

Sure. I'll make it a very brief bio, though, so I don't bore you. your audience and that's this. I'm a high school dropout who joined the U.S. Navy at the age of 17, went in very early, spent six years in the U.S. Navy, got out to go to college, spent time in the Naval Reserves, then I transferred to 12 Special Forces Group, which no longer exists, at Hamilton Airfield and Marin, and then I got commissioned in the U.S. Army, and I served both infantry and intelligence, retired in 2003, took four years to get the let out in 2007 through 12, I started contracting in Arizona for various military activities. Got so sick of the mismanagement and corporate mischief that was going on at Wachuk at the time that I got an

opportunity to go to Afghanistan in 2013 and 2015 as a contractor. In 13, I was in Kabul. And in 15, I was training Afghan Special Forces battalions up near the Uzbekbek border in the northern reaches of the of afghanistan and the hindu kush and then i uh left that got a job back home where i could stay home and stop traveling the world as an itinerary as not we we in the in the infantry and such we like to refer to ourselves as homeless guys with guns so i could finally come home and i just stay home and not deploy and that was a boon for my family and i as you know i've been writing about liberty probably since the late 90s i was writing on Lou Rockwell.com for a while until I got excommunicated by Lou.

And look, it's his property. So his excommunication, I'm square with in 2009. But what we do is that when we fall down like that, being excommunicated, I took advantage of that by starting zerogov.com. After zero gov.com, I idled that when the present regime came into power. And then my wife said, well, what are you doing? I said, well, I'm not doing much now when it comes to that. She said, well, why don't you take your military history skills, your martial skills, your knowledge of conflict, and grow that into a podcast.

Here I am, and I'm at podcast episode number 40, all of which are populated at the Libertarian Institute, along with blogging on occasion for Scott's admonitions to do so. And I don't mind that at all. I like it because it allows me to air out my brain's efforts. And here we are. Yeah. Well, it really is great to have you on board. And we also added Jeremy R. Hammond as our research fellow recently as well. And so we're constantly expanding and building the thing. And so it is really great to have you. And, you know, essentially every time I'm driving my truck without anybody else in it, I'm listening to your show, which is actually not very much. Wow. What an honor. I have to drive other people around all the time. But I have been listening to it. And one thing I had a question was, I could tell one episode, at least, where you were talking about stoicism, seemed to come from a separate podcast, but you had gone ahead and put it out on the chasing ghost podcast feed. But there didn't seem to be a note that said, hey, I have this other podcast.

And here's what it is if you want to listen to that. So I was wondering what that was about. So here's what that's about. I started The Dash, which was a Stoicism podcast, and I got three episodes. into, and I sort of ran out of gas. Stoicism not only saved my life, but it informs so much of what makes me do the right thing. And it's a, it's a spiritual and intellectual and moral guide for me, my entire family, three of my, I have five children, three sons. My three sons have taken it on as a guidepost for their lives. And it was sitting there moribund with those

three episodes, just sitting there like orphans. And I thought, you know, there's two of those episodes that I could use in chasing ghosts and get them out there in front. And of course, I think the last one you may have listened to, which is the second of the two that I posted there, and apologies to my listeners and to you, Scott, for not telling you that that is now a dead podcast, as it were, where I talked about moral injury. And I know that you have either hinted or directly spoke to moral injury, either adjacent to your conversations or it's part of what you do. I mean, I've been listening.

It's been a while since we covered it, but we have talked about it in the past, yeah. Yeah. I've, I have gone to anti-war.com since 1999, since a Romando, Rimondo days. And I don't think I've missed Neri a week since I've done that. And if anything sparked my interest besides my stoicism and moral injury, it's what I read on antiwar.com and by extension, what you do for a living. Yeah, thanks. That's definitely good to hear. well okay so i mean well tell us a little bit about stoicism i don't know what it means really i have

the barest kind of assumption about what i think it means but go ahead sure well i recommend episodes 38 and 39 i think are those stoicism episodes that i lifted from the dash and by the way scott the reason i called it the dash is because i wanted to say that on your tombstone between your birth year and your death year, that dash informs everything you do in the world. So that's why I called it the dash. But what Stoicism is all about is it isn't necessarily, even though there is a divine spark mentioned by some, Epictetus and Seneca, and more famously Marcus Aurelius, who wrote meditations, which was required reading for my lads, is such that it's all about who you are in this life, making the best of what you are in this life, and that you, you

You are measured by the character of who you are, even when you're alone and in the dark. And doing the right thing is the primary imperative to do what you do, not necessarily because it generates the karma. But here's my anecdotal experience. Carmically, if I'm good to people and gentlemanly the people and I try to do my very best for people, that tends to come around in a positive way to me. The more people I screw over, and I try not to do that, and the more people I treat in a very bad fashion, I think carmically accepting politicians, that comes home to roost in that person. I think it makes you a dark and corrupted soul. Stoicism is all about doing the right thing, knowing what your span of control is as far as what you can control in life. And I'll close it with this.

There was a movie called Bridge of Spies with Tom Hanks and another actor. And then in one scene in there, the Soviet illegal, the knock, the non-official cover guy, in 62, they were trading for the downed pilot from the U-2 spy plane on 62 in that bridge. The lawyer, this American lawyer, played by Tom Hanks, looks over at the Soviet colonel. He says, are you worried to which the Soviet colonel says something? It's from the university of intuitively obvious. He says, if I were, would it do me any good? So what I find is that Stoics, because my, I guess you could say my spirit animal is Spock, Stoics, it's not that we don't have emotion, but we try to lend our emotions in positive ways,

use them in positive ways and things, and I still work on this. I'm always a work in progress. When it comes to anger and worry and things like that, why do that? It has no positive or net good in your life to entertain that. so there it is I could speak to this on ours but I don't want to bore everybody yeah well I might could use a little bit of that but I might be a loss cause it is too late for me son um but uh all right well so tell us how this has helped you with moral injury well what is a fancy word for guilt oh man well you know what that certainly is a component here's what moral injury is I can't you can't name a single regardless of the religiosity, any combat veteran or somebody who's gone to war, or maybe somebody in a combat theater who didn't see war but was witness to what went on there, you can't have your eyes open in that environment. And this goes back thousands of years to every soldier that's ever been

on the ground, east and west, and not regret either something you did or something you saw others do that you didn't stop, or maybe you stopped, or you just come home and you start to reflect, why in the hell was I there? And why did anybody get injured and die in that that conflict. And I'm fond of saying, and I think the last time you interviewed me besides when I started my podcast, thank you for that, was back in 2010. And I remember sort of being in the thick of it then. And I had mentioned, yeah, if you don't have regret, you haven't been to war. Yeah. All right. So, but no, but the question was, so how's the stoicism helping with that? Oh, because

for instance, my wife, she says, well, PTSD, that kind of thing. I don't, I simply don't have it. And one of the reasons for that is because I'm autistic, but the other reason is stoicism. So between those two things, it has helped me to generate an inner

serenity and tranquility about things that helps me keep my dark passengers at bay and make them behave. Yeah. I would urge everybody to listen if they get a chance. Is it episode 39? That's moral injury. I think

it is. I happen to think, and there's a lot of moral injury books on Amazon as such. I would love for you to bring on an expert on that very thing, and these authors of the books would love to talk about their books, I'm certain, where we sussed this thing out and tease it out because I don't think a lot of

Americans have made the connection. Yeah. Well, you know, I know a lot of soldiers and veterans listen to this show and always have, so um yeah yeah you know you never know what's going to clue somebody in that possibly there are uh you know there's help out there or there are friends out there there are ways of dealing with things that are better than what they thought or at least different than what they knew existed out there whatever and you're a guy who clearly speaks

from real experience so you know never know if it will help somebody But, yeah, well, speaking of moral injury, how about America backing all the most evilest things in the world all the time? It's awful. It's awful. I mean, we've been doing this since 1871 with our first infant invasion of Korea that failed and then going on from there. And I think the only reason it took until 1898 in the 19th century for America to get a real colonial heart on to go after it is because we were busy in our genocide against the Aboriginal peoples of America from coast to coast. Yeah. Well, there sure is a lot of that, but let's skip the 19th century for today. But I mean – let's fast forward to now. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in current times, we have right now this war in Gaza. Which, I mean, there's a lot of different directions to go from there, but the most obvious one to me is, and maybe this is only me. Maybe that's the question. Am I crazy that I'm absolutely terrified of the bin Ladenites right now? I think, I mean, not that they're going to hurt me, but that there's going to be an attack in this country by people more or less following the doctrine of bin Laden and Zawahri, which is you got to break the American Empire first and only then.

can you get your way locally, which is got to be making more and more sense to them all the time right now, you know? Yeah, I would not use the term bin Ladenites because bin Laden, like Noriega and others, to include Hussein, as you very well know, were government employees of the United States government in the 80s, and then all of a sudden things changed. And then we find ourselves allied with al-Qaeda, allied in a convenient sense and an adjacent in both Libya and Syria where all of a sudden we had been fighting them and then we change our mind and want to use them. Why anybody in their right mind would ally themselves

with America? I don't know because we're such an on again, off again ally. And it appears to me historically, American foreign policy turns on people in a heartbeat. And then if we fast forward today and we look at what's happening in Gaza and the IDF, and it's sort of like I think this is adjacent Scott to the people call it DEI. I call it IED because I think that's more satisfactory in describing what is doing to society. There's a phenomenon called intersectional cannibalism. Are you familiar with that? No.

Oh, is this where just everybody at the socialist meeting objects to everything until they all just melt down and die? That would be, that would certainly be a variant. But in this case, the college campuses are all about Gaza. yet the Jewish war lobby, the Israeli war lobby in America is very powerful. And because of that, they have a whole lot of influence on how American foreign policy favors and protects the Israelis and the Middle East. So that being the case, and by the way, I want to make sure I do this. I need to put this out there. I just said, support of the Jewish state, support of the Israeli state, I have no animus whatsoever against Jews as individuals, I have Jewish blood, and if it weren't for Ludwig Vomisis, for Murray Rothbard, and other very prominent Jews in my intellectual and moral life, I would not be the good man that I am today.

public service announcement off. But being driven to, like you saw my latest blog piece where people were asking me, well, what do you think about what happened with Iran when they launched on, as a result of the April Fool's Day destruction of their embassy annex in Syria by the Israelis, the Iranian embassy annex, they launched this sort of weak sauce and not too successful. it was successful nonetheless because there were certainly leakers to the defenses launched this and everyone's going, well, why did Iran do that? There's a variety of reasons why Iran did that to include what the U.S. has done to Iran since 1953. But I also said the thing you've got to pay attention to here is that there's layers of onions. Would you send your oldest and worst PGMs, precision got ammunition, drones, missiles in the Iranian inventory into Israel on that day, over a few hours, to take notes on where are their A2A,

their access denial air defense sites. What are their missile barrages? How deep are their magazines? What's their tactics, techniques, and procedures in stopping this from coming in? What an intelligence bonanza for the Iranians and everybody else in the Middle East to observe the Israeli reaction to this incursion after October 7th. They've been taking notes on October 7th, the entire Islamic world has. They took notes on those PGM deliveries into Israel proper in response to the embassy bombing.

So I think we always have this notion in American triumphalism where we think we're smarter than everybody else. It turns out that since we've lost every conflict since the end of World War II, that may not instantiate in reality. But nonetheless, like in Russia and Ukraine, Russia and Ukraine are the first. first near peer, peer fight in arguably 50 years are more in which we have these two competitors using bottom weapons, modern weapons, modern TTP, tactics, techniques, and procedures, employment, how they, how the disposition and composition of their troops are, how they act in the defense, how they act in the offense. And then we have the West sending all of these tremendously expensive, exquisite armaments over there and saying, well, we'll send you tanks, we'll send

you planes, we'll get up 16s aloft, we'll send you Hamars, we'll send you that, we'll send you all of these Patriot, all of these very sophisticated modalities. The Russians, whatever you think of them, they're note takers and they're transformational. When you harken back to World War II, you see that Barbarossa, the operation of the Germans invading in the summer of 1941. Pretty stupendous when you look at it from a numbers and an initial success. But when you look at the Russian transformation of arms from 1943 to 1945 and then they reverse the tide and find themselves in Berlin in April and May of 1945, it's because they pay attention. When you look at Soviet doctrine as practiced by the Chinese from 50 to 51 in Korea, when you look at the Soviet

doctrine practiced against First World Nations in Africa. from 84 to 87 during the campaigns in Angola, and then fast forward now, the Russians have completely transformed their armed forces in 2008, and now we see them taking notes, we see generational differences in weapons on the battlefield, and we see all of these things that are starting to present themselves in a way that does not reflect the arthritic and sclerotic military might of the U.S. and the NATO midgets. Well, so back to the bin Ladenites, and I call on that because everybody else calls them Islamists, which, you know, they kind of are. But to me, it's a category error because they're really political radicals. There are plenty of fundamentalists who aren't interested in politics in this way, which, you know what I mean? It seems like religion is a lot of a red herring. It's part of it, but it's not the first part. I just use the word jihadist. Yeah. Because then you have a subset of the Islamic sect, whether she are.

Sunni who are participating in that. By the way, it just so happens that the Sunni are the ones who participate in 80% or more of the external terrorist and conflict machinations against the West. But the Sunni, of course, KSA being the ground zero for it. But then again, when you look at the Shia, which is going to be Syria, Iran, large parts of Iraq, Bahrain, and others, the West has waged a war against them because they won't wage a war against Sunnis because of KSA and by extension because of Turkey. But I think that what we may see now, Scott, go ahead. Yes.

And I think what we may see now, Scott, is for the first time in several hundred years, we may see a rapprochement between the Shi and the Sunni where they lay down their blades they've been using going after each other in a fractured style fashion. And they say, you know what? Because of Israel and by extension, the U.S.'s conduct in the Middle East since October 7th, if not going all the way back to 1947 and 1948. Because of that, we're going to lay down our grievances and our differences and we're going to fight a united front against them. And that is a worst nightmare for Israel as a nation. Yeah. Well, I mean, we just saw Jordan and Saudi Arabia participate with America in shooting down Iran's attack. So that may be a step backwards for them as far as their alliance that China's forged there. But you'll notice what Turkey said, and they are a very large and formidable NATO ally. No, I miss what they said. What did they say? Oh, so the Turks aren't participating. They don't want them passing through U.S. airspace to hit Iran.

think you're going to find a number of other countries that are doing that. And they're doing it for both real politic and because of their allegiance to the way Israel has been treating the Middle East. I mean, you know, there's, go ahead, please. Did you see the Seymour Hersch article where he says that the whole thing was a put on and that the American military worked it out with the Iranians, that you guys just fire some drones and we'll shoot them down? I did see that. I did. What do you think about that? Nothing surprises me when it comes to the perfidy of the United States Department of State. And I know previous to starting recording, I know the book that you're working on, look at what you're seeing in this entire history of the

way the State Department conducts its foreign policy. Yeah. It's like if Joe Biden was the president the whole time, that's what it is. It's just terrible. And the thing that, and I know I sound like a broken record when I say this because I've said it on two other interviews is, why is it when Russia and Ukraine got into their armed kerfuffle with the special military operation. The responsible thing for the Navarno state, if not the NATO midgets, was you open up a very nice location in Switzerland, very nice office space, teak tables, nice comfortable chairs, refreshments, and you send senior diplomats and negotiators there, and they twiddle their thumbs and you have an open invitation for the Ukraine and Russia to come and talk it out.

Why can't we talk it out? yeah well because there's a bunch of propaganda in the way amen yeah I'm going to interview Danny Davis later I just watched him and Meersheimer debate these ladies from the council on foreign relations in the Atlantic Council and the Marshall Fund at the CFR there and the Atlantic Council is pure unadulterated evil oh I know just the whole thing and just listen to the whole thing these center left liberal women talking about Ukrainians can take them And we get to keep all the money and just all of these just inane sort of like slogan. The bottom line, Scott, is that the Russians have turned three Ukrainian armies into dust in 24 months.

They've made generational and transformational changes in the way they do their business. And they don't have the ability in my mind as a military observer to take the entirety of the Ukraine. they can keep the eastern third that they have. But if NATO through Article 5 declares war on them, it's not going to be as easy as NATO makes it out to be. You're saying like nukes aside, but we just try to feel the conventional army there. Yeah, let's take nukes out of the picture, even though I think going to war between nuclear powers is always a bad proposition. But nukes aside, if we set those aside, the conventional formations of the Russians are so good at what they do in a near-peer-impeer conflict. And they have a very artillery-centric

versus air-centric domination matrix as far as the way they conduct their warfare. And there's also something they do that's really interesting. I urge your listeners to look up Lester Grau's 2018 paper on the Russian Strike Reconnaissance Complex out of the Foreign Military Studies Office. Lester Grau and I are our friends and colleagues. And look at what he says because what the Russians have done. And by the way, this is because they're a regional hegemon, like the Chinese and not a global hegemon, so they're able to do this. They are able to put metal on target as coarse and rude as that may sound within 30 seconds of detection and declaration of something that they want to neutralize or mission kill or catastrophically kill. They can do that. The

United States cannot. Now, imagine this by extension. We have the NATO allies, the coalition and such. How many languages are there in NATO? NATO's been around for a very long time, but when it comes to interoperability and coordination, they're very bad. When it comes to a strike fires complex in which at the practical and operational level, you have armies dukeing it out, we have not broken the code on how to deliver those fires in an effective fashion. Hey, y'all, Scott here. Let me tell you about Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Inc. Who knew? Artificial bank credit expansion leads to price inflation and terribly distorted

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Scott Horton Show.substack.com. Hey, y'all, Libertasbella.com is where you get Scott Horton Show and Libertarian Institute shirts, sweatshirts, 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 libertasbella.com. All right. So, I want to switch back to the Gaza thing because, well, there's so many different aspects because I want to ask you about Hamas' war, you know, as far as what's been happening in the last six months. But I kind of, I don't know how to phrase it right or whatever, but it seems like there's a cross-section sort of argument between these two things where you could have bin Laden night terrorists in the United States.

adapting, not trench warfare stuff, but like some of the drone tech that's been advanced and that kind of thing. Oh, man. Are you talking about, are you talking about a domestic insurgency in the U.S. as a result of what we're doing over there? Oh, no, not like a prolonged insurgency. I mean, I think, you know, any one county in America can be locked down. It ain't that, but it's just, you know, terrorist attacks, though, over, you know,

a day or two or whatever on a September 11 type level. And you don't have to be a terrorist. You just have to be a male to be able to imagine how easy it would be for bad guys to hit soft targets full of people in this country if they were so motivated and inclined to do so. And there can't always be a guy with a gun there to protect the place wherever it is, you know? And I just addressed this in episode 37, Storming America. where I talked about this very thing. Now, in episodes 27 and 40, I talked about shuffling towards the apocalypse in the Middle East and what that involves. But in episode 37, I spoke

specifically to what happens if in October 7th attack on Gaza occurs upscaled with an order of magnitude rater of personnel in the United States. And I talked about two books. The first one was William Ford. Hey, let me just add one thing real quick here. Please, please. Yeah. I was a cab driver, and after September 11th, American Airlines pilots in my cab told me, look, the big secret of 9-11 is that you and your four idiot friends could have done that too. Any five guys could do that. Absolutely. Take over a plane and crash it into something.

All it takes is a little bit of organization, and that's what, you know, they want to blow it up into this thing where Iran must have done it or something, because how else the truth is, any five dorks if they practiced, could do it, basically. That's it. That's it. And then Kurt Schlichter wrote a book called The Attack. And amazing, he did like a four-month turnaround on that book, Scott, where it's a novel. And it's sort of like World War Z in which he takes interviews from participants over time for the beginning, the middle, and the end of this. Now, in William Fortune's book, Day of Wrath, what it's about is this, is that you have a thousand. I'm going to use your term bin Ladenites who come here to the United States. And they hit schools, they hit arteriore. all in one day, all in 24 hours, and they're fire and forget assets because you don't have to lead them. All you got to do is put them at the starting block, send them off. They've got munitions. They've got guns. And all they do is they slaughter and kill everybody they find until they die. Now, what Schlichter did in his book is he took October 7th in Gaza, and he said, what's going to happen if we scale that up? We bring that to America. And on the first day, we have 10,000 bin Ladenites who go after public spaces. On the second day, they go after residential

spaces. On the third day, they go after infrastructure. Now, you and I, me being a member of the L.I, were very cynical about government behavior. We know what's going to happen on the second day. All the law enforcement and military entities will close on the public spaces, and then the residential spaces will be available for slaughter. Third day, the same thing happens. Everything those guys talk about in that book, Scott, all of that can happen tomorrow morning. And when you link that, and I hope that I'm not a turdna punch pole by saying that, saying this, when you link that to the absolutely unvetted and unlimited immigration over both borders and not knowing who's coming over, then you have a number of military age males and what's called in the tradecraft Knox, which are non-official cover,

which would be intelligence assets from organizations or states around the world who would come here as illegals, illegals in both permutations of that term. They're illegal coming over the border, but they're also illegal because they're not attached to an embassy as an espionage asset of that particular nation state. But you bring those folks in, and one of the disturbing aspects of Schlichter's book, The Attack, I urge your listeners to read both of these books. And by the way, Day of Wrath, the first one I mentioned by William Fortune, it's like a novella. But you'll read both of these books rather quickly. You will be unsettled for weeks, if not months after you have read these.

It is that Antifa and college students and others in a, I guess you can call it, maybe not a synchronized alliance, but a happenstance alliance, help the Beneloddnites with what they're doing by clogging up 911 systems, actually providing them with what. weapons, maybe going and conducting those kind of things with them. Because when you look at college campuses across the country right now, they are not there because they're anti-war. They're not about being against what's happening in Gaza because they're anti-war. And it's not because they're humanitarian. It's because that's the programming notes that they have because what would stop them from turning around on a dime and saying, well, the Israeli state is such and such, we could do this because most of them are NPCs. I mean, they don't have a lot invested in what they do. So to me, that's horrifying. And if you think about that, Scott, what that would lead to

is hundreds of thousands of American deaths and possibly hundreds of thousands, if not millions of American injuries. Well, I think he could scale that, you know, daydream down from thousands and thousands to just a few hundred guys. Yes. And leave out the Antifa guys because I think they're not really that dangerous, but even still, like, hijack a private plane and crash it into a nuclear power plant, but I think it's horrifying. I'm sorry? That's Schlichter's hypothesis about Antifa and college. I do think it's horrifying and possible, but go ahead.

All right. Well, but even still, like, it just would take a few to, you know, crash a gasoline truck into a crowd or machine gun, a bunch of people at a ball game, or crash a plane into a nuclear plant, or you know what I mean they don't have to get their hands on an H-bomb and you know it doesn't have to be like a crazy novel level I mean even September 11th was 20 guys

What if you hit an LNG ship at the port of L.A? Yeah sure. And you do that at 10 o'clock in the morning on a Tuesday. That's horrific. Our infrastructure protection and our infrastructure not only is it decaying but it is so prone

to sabotage And, of course, the chaos avalanche of incompetence that we're seeing right now that, yeah, I mean, it could all spin out of control. Well, and if something like that does happen, they're going to go, oh, see, radical Islam instead of, yeah, see, this is what happens. Not from, oh, supporting Israel, but supporting Israel, killing people. You know, that's always been the objection here. You know, that was in the 1996 Declaration of War by bin Laden, he doesn't say. you know, well, I mean, actually does complain about 48, but more importantly, he complains about current day. They're in Lebanon killing people and they're in the occupied territories

killing people. And that was what was his recruitment stick. And I'm sorry, I know I've been at this for 20 years straight saying the same damn thing, but still, like, there's a lesson for the future there that we keep creating that same motivation. I learned this from you, Scott. In 1996, he told us precisely what he was going to do and what was going to happen and he was correct yeah and it worked it's all right there i mean for a million dollars so here's my here's my thing about it man is that guy bag daddy said well you know bin laden's one thing but i don't have to do it zawahri says screw him he says you know just keep fighting i want to create my caliphate now and zawari says that doesn't make any sense because the americans are just going to come and bomb it even though

they help build it for you now they're going to be so embarrassed they'll have to come and bomb it, which is exactly what happened. They came and destroyed the caliphate again. And so that, in other words, from the bin Ladenite point of view, they just prove bin Laden and Zawahiri's doctrine right and Baghdaddy's doctrine wrong. That, you know what I mean? And so it just makes more sense, not that I'm trying to motivate anyone into participating in any of this. I'm just saying, from our point of view, it seems like there's a reason to fear not all Muslims or something like that, but people involved in these groups. And you talk about how bin Laden had been supported by America in the past. Well, same for a hell of a lot of jihadists that fought in Libya, Syria, and

Iraq during, you know, the Obama bin Laden years, you know, back a decade ago. You know, folks say artillery is the queen of, is the king of battle, Murphy. And Murphy's law, I call it Murphy Rex. That's the king of battle. But by extension, All conflicts are guided by this. Newton's third law is a stone cold motherfucker. And everybody pays the piper. And that's what happens. Yeah.

That's interesting. You army guys got a great way of saying stuff sometimes. So listen, what about right after October 7th and Israel started invading the place, Ramsey Baroud, it might have been his second or third piece or something after October 7th on anti-war.com. He said, Israel's already lost. We already saw this in 2014. They try to invade. Hamas guys pop up and blow them up,

and then they don't like getting blown up, so they would draw. And then they bomb from the air some more, but that doesn't work. And so I guess I got sort of a multi-layer question there about, I'd like to hear you kind of talk all about what you think about what's going on there, because it seems like counterinsurgency makes no sense whatsoever.

None whatsoever. If you're, wait, wait, but if you're talking about like a canned hunt in this tiny little strip of land where there, I know it's a couple million people and that's a lot, but it seems like if counterinsurgency was ever going to work where you find the fighters and these guys, I wouldn't call bin Ladenites or jihadists, you know, Hamas, you know, some of them are Islamists. I guess their leadership, of course, you know, are Islamists. But the average guy is just, the average guy just the same way as, you know, the average Afghan is not necessarily the Taliban just because he's fighting America.

Well, he's fighting an invader. Yeah. Well, so is it the case then that Ramsey Perude was just right, that even no matter what they do, other than just killing them all with an atom bomb or something, that Israel is essentially going to have to let the population of Gaza at some point come back, try to rebuild their territory, and the Hamas will still be there, and this will have all been for nothing from their point of view, from Israel's point of view. They will essentially accomplish nothing with this? He's correct for three reasons. Reason number one, Israel failed in 1982. They failed in 2006.

They failed in everything in between, and they have failed since then in an existential and galactic fashion. The vaunted IDF is a paper tiger, much like the Western militaries are today. Second, you can't maim and kill women and children fast enough to make a resistance dissolve, it does just the opposite and puts steel in the spine of that resistance. And number three, nothing unites bin Ladenites, Islamists, jihadists, more than Israel actively killing men, women, and children, whether they are combatants or not. And all that does is it strengthens and tempers the steel of the resistance to Israeli hegemony in the area and in the Middle East, and it will never end.

over okay but so and you know i plead guilty i i have been working on my russia book and and trying not to pay attention to this gaza thing it just disgust me too much i can't stand it but i have read in the wall street journal and also the post in the time war street journal were they yeah them too um were they all just you know quite frankly compare this to dresden and say it's as bad or worse this is they've completely flattened massive areas of the Gaza strip, almost all of it. And so it seems like, you know, again, with those very small borders and essentially nowhere to hide, I guess there's rubble everywhere, but they can bulldoze that. They've been bulldozing it, right? Like, they've been bulldozing

for decades, haven't they? Well, yeah, but I mean, not on this scale. This is different, right? This is a giant apartment buildings full of corpses, and they're just like, I don't know where they're carting it all off to but um anyway i guess well first of all back to the bin ladenites holy crap if if operation grapes of wrath in 1996 is what motivated september 11th then boy oh boy this is going to be terrible because if you look at the level of violence if that's uh anything like a one-to-one correlation there the horror unleashed here i mean this is some world historical crazy safest murder going on, you know? It is for this reason, too, is because when you look at the Middle East and you look at

it anthropologically, whatever you may think about the Islamic religion and Muslims being Muslims and such, they have a literacy rate in most of their countries that tends to be well below that of the West, but they have an oral history and oral generational familial history memory. That is phenomenal compared to us because we exercise different parts of our brain to read and take in the news the way we do. They do it by listening to people that they're around, listening to family members, things like that. And when it comes to both Sunni and Shia, they must remedy dishonors that are visited upon them. That could be anything from a Western man touches their wife at a checkpoint all the way to the night letters and kicking.

in the door in the middle of the night and killing people's livestock or killing people themselves, that's burned into their memories. They don't forget that. And by the way, these aren't urban or suburban folk who don't even know their neighbors next door for years on end. These people have four generations living under a roof. They tend to have lots of children. Because of lots of children, you tend to have familial and clan relationships that meet further out, go wider and deeper, and through blood ties and clam ties, if some kind of disturbance in the forces where someone is injured or dishonored or killed, they're never going to forget that.

I mean, it reminds me sort of is Cendor Illuminozo, and these are the kind of people they are, Cendorilluminoos, Shining Path in Peru, there was this academic bozo who started a malice insurgency there, but he managed to find some people who were rather. they were rather convinced that this was a way. So they did it. So the Peruvian forces along the U.S., of course, found two of them, a lieutenant and his assistant of one of the sections in which they were conducting the insurgency in Peru at this time, brought him up in a helicopter, they kick out his subordinate out of the helicopter at 5,000 feet, and then they turn around and they look at him and they say, well, what can you tell us? He salutes and steps out of the bird.

those are the people we're dealing with because love it or hate it when it comes to their religion they have a religious imperative to achieve their ends no matter what kind of self-immolation it leads to ultimately to their death they don't the west doesn't have that the west doesn't understand it and that's a right powerful weapon yeah um well and it's true i mean they won't give up and it seems like the Israeli strategy all these decades has been well at some point they'll give up but why would they think that? Look what Nate Yahoo was doing where he was taking Israeli and American tax dollars and funneling to Hamas. Of course he was. Because he's playing his Western style power politics in a non-Western chess game he doesn't understand.

Yeah. Well, yeah, that's interesting that I mean he's from Lithuania. I don't know. But I think there's a lot of expats there. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Is it really like he's got a Western mindset? He's not, I mean, I guess it is like the ruling cast of Israel are not from the Middle East. That's just the majority of their population. It is. While I loathe the bifurcation of left and right, I do think.

think it's germane here the labor party is left of left of left and the lacud is left of left that has always been a socialist government supremacist nation state where right now today scott you probably know this already because you know everything when it comes to this stuff but 93% of all the land in israel is owned by the israeli government that's rather socialist communist whatever you want to call it. Yeah. Justin Romando called it a socialist Sparta. In fact, that's...

I think that's... Yes. Even though they do not. The third of the clean break, even, is we really need to privatize. Yeah, they don't have the military savvy of the Spartans at their peak, though. There's no way. The IDF is a paper tiger. Yeah.

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junior high schoolers on up through the postgraduate level, and it's all very reasonably priced. Just make sure you click through from the link in the right margin at Scott Horton.org. Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom. Real history, real economics, real education. Hold on just one sec. We've got to make some money here. Man, Starbucks support for Israel's ethnic cleansing campaign is almost a disgusting is their coffee. Don't you just hate them? You, me, and a lot of other people, too.

It's time to boycott and divest from those genocidal blood-drinking traitors at Starbucks, but you're still going to need your caffeine in the morning. Well, you guys are going to love Moondos coffee. It's so good, and the price is right. Check out a massive variety of awesome tasting coffees at Moondosartisancoffee.com. You'll be glad you did. That's Moondosartisan coffee.com. Okay, so now what about Hamas and the Ukraine war? You talked about the advance in drones and tactics and the adaptability and this and that and whatever. What about Hamas's war of resistance here against the invading IDF forces?

They have these, I'm not exactly sure what they call them, but it's something like a Kossum gun. If I have this right, well, you correct me because I know you must know. it looked to me like it's more like a grenade launcher that you would see on the bottom of an M16 or something. In other words, it's like a shotgun propelled grenade compared to a rocket propelled grenade. Am I right about that? Yeah, it's a it's a 203. It's an undercarry in our army. It'll be an undercarry on an M4 or an M16 and it fires a 40 millimeter projectile.

But it doesn't fire it very far. But Hamas is doing a lot. a lot of damage with these things. In other words, they don't have RPGs. They kind of invented these custom guns or whatever they call them. Yeah, what this is, Scott, is the West is finally coming up against the wall and smashing their face into it of what one can call salvo competition, which means that quantity has a quality all of its own. So Hamas and Hezbo and all of them, I wouldn't call it unlimited, but they have a formidable stock of deep magazines of weapons like this, especially hand-carried weapons like RPGs or maybe AT-4s and every variety of other small arms

is out there. You are going to see a tremendous surge of M4 and M-16 rifle platforms that are going to come in from the Taliban in Afghanistan because we left so much behind. And all of that has made its way into the world arms market because that stuff is even popping up in the Ukraine where they're finding stuff that apparently was left in Afghanistan, but it's going to find its way to all the conflict regions in the world. And remember, before October 7th, from the western reaches of Mali, almost to the west coast of Africa, all the way to India and Pakistan, there was a solid conflict ban there that was simmering or on fire with Egypt as the exception. October 8th, Egypt starts to suffer from violence and internal problems. So now we have

this conflict ban that spans a big part of the earth right there. And all of it is because of Western meddling in the Middle East and not understanding when they move a chest piece or take a chest piece out. They don't do the extrapolated second and third order effects or even war game the unintended consequences to know that basically what they've done is they've taken the pin out of a grenade and put it in their pants. That's where we are. That's what the West is doing. They take a grenade, take the pin out, put it in their pants, and stick their tongue out. All right. So, but now, so back to the drones for a moment here.

Yeah. You know, Iran fired all these drones. Yep. And some missiles at Israel. But then they all got shot down. And in Ukraine, okay, well, go hold that thought for one sec. And in Ukraine, both sides have drones, but also both sides are able to shoot them down or jam them and fight back against them. and so possibly this is the ultimate transformation of war taking place right before our eyes

or not at all. That's a bunch of hype. What do you think? So my answer is yes, since Nagorno-Karabash in 2020 in the fall of 2020 between Azerbaijan and Armenia, that was the official kickoff of this revolution of military affairs in which the age of the man tank is over. The age of the man-combat aircraft is over. And you know I have a hard on for getting rid of carriers and carrier warfare because I think it's the crossbow in the chariot of the 21st century. But when you look at all of those, yes, and I want to speak very, I know this may say sound technical and detailed, but there's a reason for it. It is impossible for air defense systems not to have leakers if the quantity is sufficient enough, stuff that gets through. Maybe it's because somebody in the fire direction

Center didn't catch a detection declaration of a track or a track ID on time, and it got through. Some things got through, but let's suppose I'm going to suspend my disbelief. Nothing got through, but they had ISR birds or people on the ground who were taking notes on locations, composition, disposition of air defense assets, things like that. That is gold-plated intelligence for future mischief. Yeah. But the bottom line, Scott, to emphasize what you just said, which is entirely correct, here at the beginning of the 21st century, we are in a revolution in military affairs

and a change in a transformation of warfare and conflict that is just as significant as the introduction of the stirrup to the saddle in what it did for war. That's interesting. You know, well, again, age. bombs aside if we just forget about those for a moment because those big bangs are still there but this reminds me of I think it's the introduction to tragedy and hope actually where he says liberty is a matter of weapons and that it used to be that when you could have mass armies on foot with swords that power was more or less evenly distributed and people were

were, you know, typically freer, I mean, circumstances allowing and everything. But then... That's a whole other show to discuss why the Dark Ages weren't dark. But go ahead. Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, I'd like to hear that podcast for sure. But so then some jerk invented the saddle, but only a few guys could have horses and saddles. And then, so they had such an advantage over everybody else that they were able to increase the relative power of the kings and the lords over their peasants by, you know, much greater degrees. But then some guy, invented the musket. And now you could reach out and anybody could have one. And it was basically like a sword again. And you could reach out and touch somebody from way over there, even if they

had a higher social status than you, basically. And then he says, and it just so happened that right around that time was when they were making ships good enough to cross the Atlantic and settle this country. And so, as we all know in the history of the founding, that the townsfolk were just as well armed as the military. And that's why the military, and that's why the military, Laws because they weren't from here and they got shot to death. You're right. You're right. Yeah. Because they lived here.

Right. So now, you know, Joe Biden says, oh yeah, well, we got F-15s. And so we'll bomb you, Texas or whatever, this kind of thing. Like, liberals always say that. They're so... Pilots got to eat. They all want to be Abraham Lincoln so bad.

But so you know, this whole drone tech thing, I mean, these things are getting cheaper and and cheaper and cheaper for everybody. So obviously it opens up the possibility of crime and that kind of thing. But it seems like it also, you know, in the very general sense, in the hands of the militia for the long term, might really help to balance power again between the people of not just this country, but the world and their state rulers. Look, every time we have sent to the Ukraine, the leopards, the Churchill's, the Abrams, all these tanks, these two to four million dollar vehicles. The Russians have been able to use one or two lancets, and it's a lancet three now, because they've generationally transformed with double the payload.

They take a $50,000 munition and turn it into scrap. And any of these Western tanks that make their way over the eastern third of the Ukraine will be scrap in 72 hours. This is, it's the new way of world. So, okay, so I was watching this debate with, with Danny and John Nishammer. So you debated the evil one himself. I just wanted to say, hats off. You murdered him in that debate. Well, that was a long time ago, but thanks.

That was fun. Anyhow. I never got to tell you that. Oh, really? Okay, well, thank you. It was a good time. I may be doing another Soho forum debate. News coming up soon about that.

So these ladies were saying that, look, through morale and innovation in drones. tech and other things Ukraine can win here. It doesn't just come down to manpower because the Ukrainians can kill them all if we would just give them money. And so I guess playing like a steel man argument devil's advocate kind of thing on her side like the Marshall Fund lady that like

well okay so what if instead of giving them all these tanks the Americans had spent the hundred billion dollars that they've spent so far on some kind of crazy crash Manhattan project program for smaller and cheaper and more portable and more lethal

drones for the Ukrainians to use. If that's the future of everything, I mean, I don't want to say put all the regs in just one basket. I know that Russians can have jamming equipment too. And apparently they do have really good jammers and all that. But you're really saying these guys are stuck at World War I over here. But is that why they're losing? Of course, in everything, when it comes to this, I can give you root causes and proximate causes. So I can't give you one reason why the Ukrainians are losing. But there's no doubt in my mind that they are losing. I mean, it's a very wickedly corrupt government in the first place and always has been. And speaking of Steelman, what America did in 2008 and 2014 in the Ukraine, all that did was put steel in the spine of the Eastern Russian enclaves in Dombazes and said, hey, we're not going to put up with this anymore. We're not going to tolerate. So they inculturated themselves in the Russian mindset. But I just think the Russians are so superior in so many ways to the Ukrainian armed forces. They simply don't have a prayer with what is commonly employed in wars today, which, by the way, is fighting the last war, because we shouldn't have man tanks on the battlefield.

We should have maybe one man tank and four wingmen, which would be quarter-size or half-size tanks that go past that reverse military slope, put themselves in the hazard. Same thing with manned aircraft. Why have manned air combat aircraft anymore? And I know that the Air Force Mafia throughout NATO in the U.S. Well, we need it for the following reasons. You find it with Navalist with the carrier. Well, we need it for the following. Things are changing.

This is 10 years from now, if the planet is still here and not some kind of roasting bubbles, 10 years from now, and people look back, they're going to say, wow, this, from about 2010 onwards, not only have we had one revolution in military affairs, but we've had two or three because the three keys to revolutionary changes of warfare today are robotics, autonomous targeting, and what is it?

Robotics, autonomous targeting, and hypersonics. Because with hypersonics, munitions, by the way, that's married to autonomous targeting, if a hypersonic comes in, and by the way, if it's maneuverable in the terminus, and you have a human in the loop, you will not stop it.

It's impossible. You won't stop it. And who is the only here country that has perfected? I'm not going to say perfected. That is using hypersonics, Russia. And they're doing a rather good job with it. We have programs in place, but we have a Soviet, arthritic, and sclerotic acquisition system in the West, especially in the United States. It's called J-SIDS for acquisition.

That just, it gives us these rub-goldberg contraptions like the character, like the character. carrier, the USS Ford that can't reliably launch or retrieve aircraft, the little crappy ship, of which they were going to build 30. They're not building that many. And some of them are being decommissioned five years into their 30-year shelf life. The Zoom Walt Destroyer, which doesn't have an armament apart from VLS's. You've got the F-35. By the way, Matt Gates, a Florida congressman. I live in Florida now. Florida congressman took testimony from the Air Force secretary, and Scott, guess what the operational readiness rate is of F-35s in the Air Force Fleet?

Well, I know it's... Just take a guess at a percentage. Well, you'll know because I put it on the blog on our site. I'll be... No, I'm not cheating. I'll be graceful and say, possibly it's in the double digits? 29%. Okay, so that's pretty good.

And by the way, any F-35 produced between 2008 and 2012 is at 0% readiness. yeah well I mean the whole thing has always been see this is why you hired me to come aboard at L.I because I I cover this this little curious and arcane corner of the world yeah no it's not L.I it's the Institute oh sorry look at this everybody on this you gotta get walked into this game here yeah that I did okay no that's right I'm I've been corrected no it's all right you know now everybody knows um hey you mentioned the Gerald Ford there and the the aircraft carriers. And I guess I've read a bunch of things over the years that said that they're completely

obsolete because you can take them out with a ballistic missile and those can be aimed well enough now. And so there's nothing you can do about that. But it seems like you've got to get your planes to the theater somehow or just, as you're saying, the planes are obsolete too. So just forget the whole thing or. Yeah. I mean,

now look, it's this sounds like a cheap advertisement. But in episode 34, I talked about deep-sixing the carrier four. So I talk for about an hour of why we need to do it. And I, like you, I provide the footnotes and the receipts for why that needs to happen. But it's a mess. I mean, did you know that they took all the urinals off of that ship and they're all toilets?

For those sailors in your audience, and I'm talking to either military sailors or folks who just crews in a nice blue water teak catch, you don't want a toilet because of sea. states. If it's C-State 2 and above, guess what toilets do and guess what dry urinals don't do. But why do you think they did that? You can guess. Contracting conflict of interest. And IED. Yep. Oh, and the diversity thing. I got you. That's hilarious. So you're talking about the Gerald Ford, the one that can't launch a plane? Oh, yeah. Yeah. By the way, it has a mean time between failure of 1 and 115. Instead of steam catapults, which is one in 35,000.

Okay, I don't understand what that means, but I do know that I... Here's what it means. I'm going to go over real quick. It'll take me 30 seconds. Go. In order to launch an aircraft off the deck of an aircraft carrier, I have to be at full military power. I have to have the catapult send me forward,

and I have to be 30 knots into the wind. Those three things have to happen to get that carrier out, to get that plane off the carrier safely. So if one of those things fails, in this case, the launching catapult because of the e-mall system, I'm going to go in the drink. But you'll notice if you look at a carrier from on high, it's got a 15-degree offset for the launch so that the ship doesn't run over the plane. Right. And therefore, too, a shorter runway than the whole length of the plane. I guess you need the bow for storing more planes.

I remember Donald Trump got in trouble for complaining about the captain. catapult. Oh, you guys got this fancy new catapult, but it doesn't work. Why don't you just put the old kind of catapult in? And they all went, oh, he can't say that. But you're telling me it still doesn't work. Oh, it's a mess. Yeah. So get this, they've got 11 weapons elevators on there. But what they did, and I'll stand correct if the listener tells me they've solved this already. All of those are on the same circuit. So if one weapons elevator fails, they all fail. Okay, that makes sense. You know, I like to subscribe to defense. news and UPI has sort of like a UPI too is just all military industrial complex news stuff and so they always what's fun about the business

news about military affairs is it's always just kind of straight to the point no irony kind of thing you know they just tell you and they don't realize maybe how embarrassing it is what they're admitting that kind of thing so they'll be like yeah look we're starting this brand new

program we're going to see if we can get the F-13 B, I guess, is the marine version to go on the aircraft carriers. We'll see if we can get it now to communicate with the aircraft carriers' tower, which has been a real problem. We haven't figured out how to get their computers to talk to these computers here. Look, this is apocryphal, but you know we've got a huge cannibalized bone yard in Davis-Montan Air Base. It's called the AMARG. And that's where they keep all these aircraft.

And you'll see acres and acres of decommissioned aircraft. several F-22s, I have it on good authority, it was two dozen. They were bricked because they missed two software patches. Well, just because they made more money selling a new F-35 to replace it, or what? That could be the case, too. I mean, they say the F-22 is a superior airplane, but I remember Robert Gates saying, yeah, but you can't drop a bomb on a Taliban with it. It's more for like air-to-air, and we want to focus on killing peasants, not fighting China right now.

Was the speech that he gave about it, right? That's it. But so now they would rather fight China. They don't want it. So I guess they're not going to bring back the F-22. It's too late now. It's too late. Yeah.

I think we're... But they can't make the F-35 work. They just can't. They cannot. They wanted it to do too many things. They can't make it talk to its carrier. They did something called concurrent technology, which is where they're building stuff and the technology hasn't matured yet, but we're hoping that by the time it goes

to its operational phase, it'll be done. Right. It doesn't work. Yeah. In fact, that was the other one, was they're working on software to see if they can get the F-22 and F-35 to be able to communicate with each other because they can't. They have to come up with it. They can't just put a motor roll of radio in there, I guess.

You can't make the stuff up. Imagine, I mean, who, and no one. gets fired. No one. No one in uniform gets fired. Yeah. I one time started a speech with that and I, like, it was the joke at the beginning of the speech. And then I said, there's no punchline. Just that's it. That was the headline this morning. They're going to try to get the F-35 and the F-22 to be able to get to talk to each other. That's all. So, I mean, yeah, I don't know, man. Do you, do you think, think, I mean, if you look at the raw numbers, I know that'll deceive you. But in a real war against Sands nuclear weapons, I guess the idea is that America has so many more ships and so

many more planes and so many more tanks that against Russia and China or Iran, that there's no question that we would just bomb the hell out of them and eventually win. You think that's That's not true. And maybe we could do that in another episode or we'll cover that very thing and why the American military is the most expensive martial paper tiger in the history of mankind. Yeah. Well, I know they lost the Afghan war, so. In a big way.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, listen, man, thank you for being part of the Institute. And thank you for your great show. It's called Chasing Ghosts and the Irregular Warfare Podcast about counter- insurgency everything about counterinsurgency it's so great listening you host that show you're like well so here are some of the 900 books i've read about each one of these topics and you just bring up so

much history and and so much documentation about what you're talking about and you know like if anybody ever wanted to do a deep dive themselves on any of these topics you definitely you know chart them a path about where they can learn about all the stuff you're talking about too whether it's you know fighting in Asia or wherever. Yeah. Thank you. So, yeah, it's really great. I listen to it all the time. It's chasing goes and it's at the Libertarian Institute, Libertarian Institute.org. And you can find them on the blog there too. And you got a substack?

I do have a substack. It's a chasing ghost substack. You'll be able to find it if you use that. As a matter of fact, I think that at the Institute, see, I got it right that time, at the Institute, when you look at the reader notes for my podcast, it's right there. okay great all right what i love about that is people can comment oh okay yeah yeah very good um all right well thank you so much for coming on the show bill it's great to talk to you again hey it's an honor and a pleasure scott and thanks for what you do thanks for the institute and i am honored to be the smetley d butler fellow for military affairs there man i'm honored to have you and i know we all are so thank you again outstanding the scott horton show anti-war radio can be heard on K-P-F-K 90.7 FM in LA.

APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scott Horton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.