The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1094: Russia and Iran's Superior Military Technology w/ Larry C. Johnson

Episode Date: August 18, 2024

58 MinutesPG-13Larry C. Johnson is a former CIA analyst who now comments on national and world affairs.Larry joins Pete to talk about how Russia and Iran have catapulted themselves past the USA in military technology.Sonor21 dot comPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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So if you head over to Gumroad and you subscribe through there, you'll get the episodes early and ad-free, and you'll get an invite into the telegram group. So I really appreciate all the support everyone's giving me, and I hope to expand the show even more than it already has. Thank you so much. I want to welcome everyone back to the Piquanese show. I'm here with Larry Johnson. How are you doing today, Larry? I am great. Thank you for having me.

No problem at all. Tell everybody a little bit about yourself as much as you want to share. I'm an old guy that couldn't hold a job. So I did a tour with the Central Intelligence Agency. I worked on both the operations side of the house, but most of my short career there was on the analytical side. I left CIA to go to the Department of States Office of Counterterrorism, spent four years there, worked on issues like the bombing of investigation of the bombing of PAM 103 there during the first Gulf War. And then after that, moved out into the field of consulting.

And so during the next, basically from 2009-94 to now, so we're talking about 30 years, I've been involved with script. scripting counterterrorism exercises for U.S. military special operations forces. I was involved with over 250 of those. And then also conducted international financial investigations onto money laundering and counterfeiting activities. So I've had a pretty varied background. What makes me sort of unique among a lot of the pundits out there on the air is I've worked on the intelligence side of the house.

and have intimate knowledge of that. I've worked on the policy side of the house with respect to State Department. I've worked closely with the FBI with investigations. And I spent really 24 years working with the top tier of U.S. military special operations forces. And so I sort of know how all the sausage is made. That's great. Then I guess you're the man to talk to about this subject. So I've, watching the conversations that a lot of the tech guys are having and also some of the things that are making it into the mainstream of politics, it looks like technology and especially military technology is a big worry for people.

And it's been pointed out to me recently that maybe because of, just believing we're the biggest kid on the block and that no one will ever mess with us, that countries like Russia have surpassed us by far in military technology. I know that's a broad subject to start with, but what are your opinions on that? No, it's not an opinion, it's a fact. In terms of talking about being able to field combat effective, weapons. Let's go, for example, on the air defense side, the United States under George W. Bush, in 2001, summer of 2002, walked away from the anti-ballistic missile treaty and said, we're no longer

going to follow it. We cancel it. No more ABM. The purpose of the anti-ballistic missile treaty was to prevent Russia, the then Soviet Union, and the United States, from building ballistic missile defense systems that if they were effective, would make nuclear war a possibility, because if I have an effective ballistic missile defense system, and you don't, I can launch my nukes at you, but if you launch your nukes at me, I'm going to be able to defeat them. So I can win that war. So what did the United States do?

Oh, we walked away from it. And ostensibly to start focusing on building ballistic missile defense. If you go back and read a lot of the commentary by the Bush administration during its first year prior to 9-11, they were talking about needing to build up a missile defense, missile defense. But it was always couch and towards space-based. The Russians tried to say, hey, what are you guys crazy? no, let's not do this. You're opening up a whole can of worms,

and the United States told them to screw off. So the Russians, okay. So the Russians set about, and they have built anti-ballistic missile defense systems, the S-400, S-500, and the latest iteration is S-550, which can deal with space-based weapons. We don't have anything

that can compete with what the Russians have. Nothing. The best we come up with is the Patriot missile. It's a dud. And in any event, Lockheed Martin can only produce 550 of the missiles a year. And you think, well, that's not such a bad number until you realize every time you put one of the Patriot missiles in a launcher,

and there's an inbound target coming at them, that Patriot needs to launch two, of its missiles to take out one inbound target. To illustrate last, I think it was December 28th in Ukraine, the Russians launched on one day 244 missiles. Now, if Ukraine had a full complement of patriots and had fired Patriot missiles to try to counteract that attack, You know, do the math.

488. That's about 80% of everything that Lockheed Martin produces in a year. It's used up in one day. You start there. Cruise missiles, but hypersonic

cruise missiles, hypersonic ballistic missiles. The United States still has not tested or has not fielded a workable design. We've been spending billions of dollars on it, but haven't been able to come up with one. The Russians have at least three functional tested hypersonic missiles. And these are particularly

important when it comes to U.S. Carrier Task Force. The United States Navy does not have any defensive system onboard that can prevent it from being hit by a hypersonic missile. Space program. United States has been using Russia as our Uber or Lyft driver for the last almost 20 years. I mean, right now there are two astronaut stranded in space because we, the United States, who is supposedly at the technological cutting edge, we're the leader. We're the best. We can't get them back from the space station because our rockets don't work.

We're going to have to ask the Russians for help or maybe Elon Musk will come to our rescue. I mean, what has transpired in the defense industry over the last 30 years is a level of corruption, incestuous activity that has left, given the United States and, you know, Donald Trump's wrong. We don't have the best military in the world, but by God, we got the most expensive military in the world. When you, the B2 bomber, $2 billion a pop. I mean, it's crazy. The F-35 combat air jet, $100 million per each one. You know, they fly into combat. They can get shot down.

And it's not like we can rebuild those in a heartbeat. No, so across the board, The Russians exceed and excel everything that we're doing with respect to electronic warfare. We're not even in the same league. So the United States is living an illusion. And what we've seen over the last two and a half years, despite the propaganda in the West, is that Russia has and is defeating a NATO proxy army. If the outbreak of this conflict, the Ukrainian army was larger than the Russian army.

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com. Well, it seems that Russia is building and designing their weaponry to protect Russia. And the United States is building and designing weaponry to basically enrich special interests. And I've talked to two separate people who've worked on the F-35 project, and they both agree that this is a dud, that it's a dog. You know, and they say, I'm just trying to do my best to make this thing fly. And they say it's impossible. It's going to be, they've already spent trillions on this, and it's a dud. So when you, let's talk about missile technology.

We hear all this talk about wanting to go to war with Iran. I would assume, I know the topography of Iran, I know where you can hide all of the anti-missile systems, I would assume that Iran has Russia's technology. So it just seems like whenever we talk about going to war with Iran, you would either have to launch every nuke at it, or you're going to try to go in on the ground, and you're going to try to go in on the ground, and you don't even have somewhere to stage from. I mean, Saudi is not a place where you can stage from. You'd have to reinvade Iraq.

Turkey's not going to allow you to do it. None of the stands are going to allow you to do it. So it seems to me that this is just waving your fist at a country that has taken the technology, is using the technology of someone who's far beyond us, and they can just basically do whatever they want, wag their finger at anyone. And it seems like they're doing a pretty good job

with doing that at Israel right now. now. Yeah, we've got a, we've got a sick obsession with Iran. And, you know, part of it is what I call a creation of our making. Because as long as we've got Iran, we have a good enemy to justify, again, an $850 billion defense budget. And you're exactly right. You put your finger on it at the outset. what the United States does our defense budget is not guided by any kind of national strategic doctrine. Our doctrine, you know, I always like to use the old skit from Saturday Night Live with Christopher Walken, where they did the takeoff on blue oyster colt. More Cal Bell! More Cal Bell! That's what we need.

We need more Calvel, more defense spending. No matter what happens, we need more. Not less. The Soviet Union collapses 91. We need more. So it lies that this is, it's a grift. And you're correct about Iran. I was one of the, you know, one of the exercises I was involved with involved

looking at what it would require to attack. a nuclear target inside Iran that's buried underground, what they call hardened, deeply buried targets, HDBT's. I guess that's where the term for the movie Mission Impossible comes from, because it ain't going to happen. And all these armchair warriors and generals in the United States, say, go, yeah, let's go fight Iran. you know, they're not good of reading a map.

Iran's four times the size of Iraq and Iran's terrain, as you correctly noted, far more difficult with the mountains and such to navigate and to move through. We could never put troops in on the ground. But what the real game changer now, well, at least two of them. Ten years ago, 11 years ago,

Iran downed a CIA, drone, one of the most sophisticated drones in the CIA lineup there. Iranians are pretty good at reverse engineering, which is exactly what they did. And so these Shahid drones that we've seen flying around in Ukraine, that's modeled after with the CIA drone. And the Iranians have become very adept at building drone technology and making advances on that front, which not only rivaled, but it probably outmatch what we're doing here. in the United States, particularly in terms of drones that can go into, be employed in tactical missions on the battlefield.

Then in 2019, Iran conducted joint naval military exercises with Russia and China. Now, for your listeners who don't understand what it means when you do a military exercise, It's not like, you know, the Iranians called up the Russians and Chinese and said, Hey, you know, Vladimir Shi, can you guys come over and play up my house today? And, you know, we'll go out and sell ships around and pretend like we're doing war. No. Usually it starts with a planning process, like 18 months out, minimum of 12, but more likely 18 months to 2 years. So that means starting around 2017,

The Russians, Chinese, were talking with the Iranians about, hey, how can we work together militarily? By 2019, they started doing that first military exercise. Well, they've done that exercise every year since. We're up on year number five of joint military exercises. But they've also conducted ground with troops and in coordination, how to communicate, how to interact, how to coordinate. So in the aftermath of the assassination of the Hamas Politburo chief, Ismail Hania, Sergei Shogu, former defense minister of Russia, now special sort of special defense guru for Vladimir Putin,

went to Tehran to meet with the new president, meet with the defense minister, and meet with the supreme leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini. And then these IL-76 transports started showing up in Tehran. What could they be bringing? I believe that they were bringing a combination of electronic warfare equipment as well as S-400 air defense systems that were then deployed around key installations, targets, potential targets in Iran,

and accompanying those S-400 defense systems are Russian troops. So what we have right now is you've actually got Russian forces sitting on Russian weapons systems inside Iran to help Iran defend itself in the event that there is an attack by the United States and Israel. There's so much rugby on Sports Extra from Sky, they've asked me to read the whole lad at the same speed I usually use for the legal bit at the end. Here goes. This winter sports extra is jam-packed with rugby. For the first time we've got every Champions Cup match exclusively live, plus action from the URC, the Challenge Cup, and much more. Thus the URC and all the best European rugby all in the same place.

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Let me paint a scenario for you and a theory and tell me what you think of it. A few months ago, drones and missiles were sent at Israel and from Iran. And the story is that none of them landed. They landed in the desert, yad-y-y-a-y-a-da. I think 90% of them were seeking data on the Iron Dome and sending that back. And I think maybe as much as 10% of them could have hit Site 512 in Gaza, the most secret site in Israel, which basically controls all of their air defenses. and done significant damage.

Do you think there's anything to my theory? I don't think it's a theory. I think it's actually, I was going to say, what are you an Iranian agent, divulging secret Iranian plans? No, actually, you're spot on. What Iran did was there was actually some backchannel communications with the United States even,

where the United States was trying to dissuade Iran from launching a attack that could have really, escalated into a major region war. And so Iran did something that I thought was very smart at the time. They did a, let's call it a demonstration project for Israel and the rest of the world for that matter. So I said, okay, here's what we can do.

And so that first wave of drones that was launched and they took off like six hours. You know, they lifted off first. It was a six hour journey for them. those were old drones. That wasn't their latest, greatest. That wasn't their best. They were sending stuff that they knew

it would get shot down. And then that was followed by the cruise missiles. And then that was followed by ballistic missiles. And so they all sort of arrived within a fairly narrow time window. And Iran was demonstrating, A, we have a way to overwhelm your air defense, which they absolutely can. But as you also noted,

They were collecting intelligence. They were saying, hey, let's see what is the nature of this air defense system. But they also, Iran also demonstrated with one of its ballistic missiles. I don't know if you saw the video, but the missiles coming down and then it does this. It made a hard right turn and then went straight down. It was maneuverable. You're going, whoa, wait a second. you know, that's not, it wasn't just following the laws of gravity here.

They were able to maneuver it. So what we're set up for now is I don't see Iran doing a repeat of what they did on April 13th. But they are going to hit Israel, and they may very well hit the site that you mentioned and destroy it this time. You know, not just, you know, they'll take that out, destroy it. and then tell Israel, you know, give the Israelis a chance to sit back. The West, I know that the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, the analysts there, according to friends of mine, have said that the message coming out of there is that Iran is afraid, Iran's reluctant to launch, Iran, you know, they're downplaying the chance of any Iranian retaliation because we're.

the West, we're so strong and they fear us so much. I think that's a lot of garbage. It's just a lot of self-delusion. The reality is Iran is being very patient and it's taking its time and it's dotting eyes, crossing T's, it's not acting emotionally at all. And our mutual friend, I was telling him a story the other night that, you know, he's too young to remember. But in July of

1988, the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian airbus over the Persian Gulf. And the Iranians took that as it was deliberately targeted. And they vowed revenge.

Six months later, Pan Am 103 was blown up over Lockerbie Scotland. You can see a poster behind me shows Lama Femin and the other cohort of his from Libya, they were the ones who planted the bomb. But I know from one of my CIA buddies retired Bob Baer, Bear, Bear is very insistent that this was an Iranian operation, Iranian funded.

The point of this is Iran's patient. They're not under some time stopwatch with time ticking down that they've got a, you know, complete retaliation. So we're in a situation right now where Iran with the backing of Russia is in a position to defeat the United States. And people say, oh, come on. Are you crazy? Hey, I've got a recent example to me. But there's my point.

Look how badly the United States kicked the ass of the Houthis in Yemen. Oh, that's right. They're still there. They're still firing rockets. They're still hitting ships. And our aircraft carrier and task force group had to leave the area because we basically ran out of gas. Now, if we cannot defeat the Houthis and this, now we're going on like 10 months, nine months, if we can't take care of the Houthis, we're going to really take care of Iran.

I mean, for heaven's sakes. people, the politicians in this country, and that includes everybody from Donald Trump to Kamala Harris, to Lindsay Graham, to Richard Blumenthal, Republicans and Democrats alike need to get a grip on reality. Because frankly, they've been telling themselves lies, sweet little lies for a long time. There's so much rugby on Sports Exter from Sky, they've asked me to read the whole lad at the same speed I usually use for the legal bit at the end. Here goes. This winter sports extra is Jampack Grays. for the first time we've got every Champions Cup match exclusively live plus action from the URC the Challenge Cup and much more thus the URC and all the best European rugby all in the same place get more exclusively live tournaments than ever before on Sports Extra jam pack with

rugby whew that is a lot of rugby get sports extra on Sky for 15 euro a month for 12 months search Sports Extra new sports extra customers only standard pressing applies after 12 months further terms apply don't let foot pain or discomfort hold you back at foot solutions we specialize in high quality supportive footwear and use the a scanning technology to custom-make orthotics designed for your unique feet. If you want to free your feet in joints from pain, improve balance or correct alignment, book a free foot assessment at footsolutions.i or pop-in store today. Food Solutions, the first step towards pain-free feet.

On the many days of Christmas, the Guinness Storehouse brings to thee, a visit filled with festivity. Experience a story of Ireland's most iconic beer in a stunning Christmas setting at the Guinness Storehouse. Enjoy seven floors of interactive exhibitions and finish your visit with brett taken views of Dublin City from the home of Guinness. Live entertainment, great memories and the gravity bar. My goodness is Christmas at the Guinness Storehouse. Book now at ginnestorehouse.com. Get the facts. Be drinkaware. Visit drinkaware.com. Something you said there really resonated. You said that Iran just can sit back and take their time. Whenever I talk about Iran to people, they, always want to bring up the storming of the embassy. And in in 79, and it was a 79 or 78,

79, 79. 79. It was, yeah, 44 days, yeah. Yeah, November 79. Yeah. And they want to bring that up. And I'm like, that, that was a reaction from 1953. Yeah. They have long memories. They have low time preference. They wait and they wait and they wait. They were occupied and then they saw their they saw their chance and they took it. And people don't get that. Yeah. So yeah. Yeah, well, I did an interview the other day with an Iranian professor, Muhammad Sayyad Marandi. Sounds very Muslim. And when I started the interview off, I said, so, Professor, where were you born in Iran?

And he goes, I wasn't born in Iran. I was born in Dayton, Ohio. I go, what? He goes, yeah, my dad was being targeted by the Shah of Iran. They had arrest warrants out for him. They're going to put him in prison and torture him. So my parents got out of Iran and my mom was pregnant with me and we wound up in the United States and so I was born in Dayton, Ohio. I says, oh, my God, you're an American.

What's important about that is his dad wasn't some Muslim cleric. His dad was a pediatrician, okay, a doctor, someone designed who's by training to provide healing and trying to get people well. So the fact that they were being threatened by the goons of the Shah of Iran shows you how bad the situation was in that society at the time. And, you know, the American narrative on the hostage taking is, as you noted, that here we were just minding our own business. And these damn crazy Muslims came storming the windows because I hid our freedom. No, no, a lot more complicated than that.

And I knew a couple of the people held hostage. Anne Swift, one of my colleagues at State Department. She's now deceased, but she was one of the hostages there. But the fact is, we were meddling in the internal affairs of Iran for well over 25 years before they took it upon themselves to throw us out to overturn American influence. And we haven't stopped. We didn't stop then. You know, in the, in 1981, when Ronald Reagan had taken office,

CIA walked into Reagan's into the White House with accompanied by Israeli intelligence, Mossad, and got permission to sell weapons to provide U.S. weapons to the government of Iran. Under the Ayatollah Khomeini, of all things. and for the next six years, the United States was involved in this duplicitous mission where we were arming both Iran and Iraq while Iran and Iraq were engaged in a bloody war that killed millions. And from the United States standpoint, we were happy to have them fighting, happy to have them bleeding themselves out. because we saw it as a way to weaken Soviet influence in the region.

I mean, this is really how sick and perverse our foreign policy has been. And it is a record of meddling and interference. And I'm always struck by how exercise we get in this country. My God, the Chinese are trying to interfere with our sacred election or the Russians. You know, please spare me the bullshit. it. That's all we've done as a country is metal in the internal politics of other countries for over 70 years since, well, that's 76 years since the founding of the CIA. That's what we do.

And yet, you know, it's like the old saying, we can dish it out, but baby, we can't take it. And so what's happened in Iran is, you know, we, we like to tell the tell. Iran's the greatest sponsor of terrorism in the world. No, it's not. I'll argue that with anybody any day. With the facts. The fact of the matter is the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world is the United States, in my view. For example, up until 2011, there was a group called the M.E.K., the Mujahideen Akalk. They were listed as a terrorist organization because they were carrying out acts of violence against civilians inside Iran. 2012, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama takes the MEC off the list.

The neocons were celebrating, yay, the John Bolton's, oh my God, this is wonderful. And we started providing money and training to the MEC, and they started carrying out terrorist attacks really under our direction. inside Iran. So as I said, spare me all the sanctimony because it's nothing but hypocrisy. I want to move on to China, but before I do, you had mentioned that missile that came down and then changed direction.

Right. Is there any doubt in your mind that that probably is Russian technology? Oh, hell, no. I think it's Iranian. No, I think it's Iranian. Iranians are smart people. You know, they've, they're very, they're very capable.

It is, there's been an, there's been an intelligence sharing back and forth between Iran and Russia. That has, that has grown stronger over the last three years. The special military operation and the West, the West attempt to destroy Russia through economic sanctions, apart from using Ukraine as a proxy, really finally awakened the Russians to the kind of threat they face from overseas. And then with Iran having been a victim of Western sanctions for, you know, going on decades now, and yet still standing strong, it was Iran through its drones that helped Russia in the early phases. If anybody can be credited with the game changer in the war in the Ukraine,

there would probably be Iran and its drone technology. Because the drone technology was the great game changer. So, no, I couldn't. The Iranians have developed their own missile technology. But the sharing back and forth with Russia is certainly there. Well, one more thing on that. I think somebody who would be looking at this, and you had mentioned that Russia's technology is far beyond ours.

When you look at what's happened in Ukraine, that it's still going on two and a half, almost two and a half years later, some may argue the point that if their technology is so far ahead of ours, that this should be over by now, in your opinion, why isn't this over? Well, for starters, There's not a single member of the U.S. military that is in any position to talk about what Russia ought to be doing or should be doing.

Let's come up with our long list of victories. Hey, our victory over Iraq. Well, no, that didn't count. How about Afghanistan? Well, no. Somalia. Vietnam. Korea.

Fact of the matter is, since the end of World War II, the United States has not won a single war against a pure nation at all or even a sub-peer nation. So, you know, everybody's entitled to their opinions, but their ignorance about what Russia is doing is to me just staggering. Russia is embarked on a campaign, as they said from the outset initially, to demilitarize Ukraine and denotify it. With that, they are not launching these big, what they call, big aerial defenses,

where they're going to launch tank columns, troops, armored personnel carriers, aircraft moving forward to take territory in a rapid manner. This is a way to incur higher casualties. The rate of fire compared to what Russia's firing to Ukraine. The Russians for about every eight or nine

artillery rounds, they're firing. The Ukraine's fire, Ukrainians fire one. Well, guess what? That means Ukrainians are going to suffer that many more casualties, which has been the case. Despite Western propaganda that all Russia's lost a half million men, no, they haven't. They probably total dead right now after two and a half years of war, 70,000. And it's not a small number, but it pales in comparison with the Ukrainians have at least, at least 600,000 dead, at least, if not higher. And that's not counting the number of wounded. which is probably double to triple that number.

So Russia in the process, they've also been fighting NATO. NATO has been providing the intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance data to the Ukrainians. They've been providing planning and tactics that have failed abysmally. It was a NATO plan for the Ukrainian counteroffensive last summer, June of 12. 2003. And that, you know, they were assured that they'd be at the Crimea, dipping their toes in the Black Sea by August. And they never advanced more than probably 20 kilometers into one,

only one of the three defensive lines that have been erected by General Seraviken. So Russia is taking, it has been taken. has been taking its time up until recently. But if anybody's following what's taking place right now, the Donbos, whereas, you know, a year ago, you could measure progress and movement on the battlefield, sometimes two or three kilometers per month. Now they're doing probably five to ten kilometers a week.

They're rapidly moving east to west. towards the Neeper River. They're on pace, I believe, that they will take full, the Russians will take full control of the Dhenzke Republic, as well as the well of the Le Hance Republic by the end of September at the latest.

All right, let's move on to China. Because one of the reasons is I've been following some of the tech guys, people like Mark Andresen, and he's been screaming that, there's no way we can be allowed to lose the AI quantum computing war with China. And when you really start looking at it and looking at the technology, you have to agree. There's not going to be a hot war with China that isn't nuclear.

So you're not going to have boots on the ground. So we're going to have a technological war with them. And then Donald Trump yesterday during a press conference slash stump speech, he mentions that we have to win the war with China over AI. That we have to be, we have to win the AI war. We have to win the quantum computing war just as the same kind of rhetoric that was happening in the 40s that we have to win the nuclear race. So in your opinion, what, what. What is the threat from China when it comes to technology? Yeah, so let me challenge the very basic premise of your question.

It's not really your premise, but it's the mindset in the United States. Why are we convinced, why are we convinced ourselves that China is our enemy and we must destroy them? 1972, when Richard Nixon went to China to open up U.S. relations with the then really full-blown communist country of China under Mao Zedong, his translator on that trip was ambassador, now retired ambassador Charles Friedman, Chaz Freeman. And actually, I talked to Chas this week about this. you know, when the United States did that opening to China, we finally conceded that after years of backing Shanghai Shek and the Chinese nationalists, we agreed with the Chinese communists

that Taiwan is part of China. That Taiwan is part of China as much as Hawaii as part of the United States. We agreed to that. It's called the One China Policy. And so then at that point, the United States began, you know, our corporation said, boy, there are a billion people over there. Man, if we can get them to buy a billion McDonald's hamburgers or whatever,

we're going to be making some big money. And the number of U.S. corporations that rushed into China and have set up operations there of, you know, staggering. It's actually now to the point that there was a RAND report came out recently that noted that there are 12 defense systems weapons, weapons systems that the United States manufacturers or tries to manufacture that are utterly dependent on components from China. And yet, and then on top of that, I got a buddy who he produces supplements, vitamin supplements. And he just informed me that really the only source for vitamin D3 in the world is China. And the Chinese are now raising the price on that. There are some other critical pharmaceuticals that the United States is dependent upon.

And yet with all of this, we are now connected to, you know, it's like it may be a bad marriage, but, you know, China's got 50% of our assets. Okay, so, you know, if we're going to run off with the secretary of the babysitter, you may want to think again. And against this backdrop, we keep pretending like China is the one with an aggressive military force that's been invading other countries with the expeditionary military, sending its military here and there, setting up bases overseas. That's us. It's not them. the last country that China, quote, invaded

was when it launched troops into Vietnam in 1979 because Vietnam was attacking China's friend Cambodia and the Chinese were trying to help. So the fact is the Chinese have had a stay-at-home military. We're the ones with over 600 or 800 bases. I've lost friggin' count overseas. we're the ones constantly sending our forces into Africa, into Asia, into Europe, into Latin America.

Are we sent them around the world? For what? Because we're trying to control it. And yet we keep describing China as the threat. And here's the Chinese looking at what we're doing. They're looking at what we're saying. We are politicians and some of our military leaders are on the record, saying in public that China is an enemy and we're going to be at war with them by 2025.

If you're the Chinese listening to that, you're going to sit back and say, oh, those crazy Americans, they're always talking smack, but they don't mean it? Or would you say, no, we've got to take them at their word. These people are crazy. And so the United States, with our gift for not speaking foreign languages, for not really knowing foreign cultures, for being so uniquely inward-looking, and yet arrogant in terms of our dealing with other countries around the world.

I've described that our manual on foreign policy, it's written by the same serial rapist who wrote the book on a guide to love and dating. Okay? The last thing you want is a book on romance by a serial rapist. And yet we are right now, in my view, the United States has become the equivalent of a serial rapist in dealing with other countries around the world.

Because all we do is we're either going to sanction you and or we're going to conduct a color revolution complete with CIA covert operations, or we're going to go to war with you. Candies and flowers and a dinner out, forget about that. It's all by force. And I'll address a few points there because I agree with you on military force.

We need regime change in this country. The whole idea that we're supposed to have a strong military posture against China is ridiculous, because that can only end one way. I will say that by having, when you have somebody who is responsible for even the parts of military hardware that you rely upon,

then you become, they're either your closest friend or they have you by the balls. Right. And, you know, I mean, Ludvach, Edward Lutvok talked about this in Kudetatah that if you, the easiest way to, you know, that's why there's only seven countries in the world that have military hardware

that have the kind of military hardware that can go to war so that they can control every other country that has to do business with them. But, yeah, I don't think the whole idea, and this goes back to another thing where it was like, well, if we just open up trade with people, there's this old libertarian idea that if you just open up trade with people, it automatically makes you friends with them, you know, when goods don't cross borders, armies will, that kind of, that kind of rhetoric. But I still think that there's, if we're, if so much of our manufacturing is tied to them and they haven't always been the greatest, you know, the most honest actor, and they do definitely operate in their own self-interest. And there are so, just like our,

our government, there are so many different interests within that government. We're in danger if we allow them to get the upper hand on us in anything. Well, you know, I'm not trying to paint a picture of China and Russia's, you know, benign gentle souls with no problems or no evildoers in their midst. Yeah, you know, you said it again accurately. Self-interest. I believe all nations are governed by self-interest and does not forget the power of money. So, you know, one of the criticisms of China is the fact that the Chinese are in bed with Colombian drug traffickers and the production of synthetic narcotics that are destroying the lives of Americans.

They do that. The Chinese have been involved with what's called the straw purchase of luxury automobiles in the United States. Well, they're actually pay people to go in and buy a brand new Mercedes or BMW. Then they come out and toss the keys over to a broker. And then those cars are shipped over to China and resold at a higher price. I think one of the largest dealers in these illegal cars is the brother. or the trade minister in China. So, you know, I don't have any naive illusions about Chinese for that,

but let me point out, because me and my partners, three of us, we worked directly on a civil racketeering case against the major tobacco companies, Philip Morris, Japan Tobacco, British American Tobacco, R.J. Reynolds, that were involved in dealing directly with narcotics, cartels in Mexico and Columbia. I mean, you know, whether it's the government of China or business interests in China dealing with them, we've got the same here in the United States, for God's sake. So my point is, don't, you know, don't be like, you know, the male prostitute out complaining

about other people's sexual behavior. You know, worry about your own self first. Clean your own act up. And I think we are ultimately in the... this world, we're going to be better off if we can find a way that we don't have to justify, you know, what's going to be a trillion dollar defense budget soon and stand always ready to get into a fight. You know, I'm a one of the other things I do in my life, I'm a firearms instructor and I'm certified. I train instructors.

and when I train people to carry a concealed firearm, they carry that concealed firearm in the event that they are faced with a life and death situation where they have no other option but to kill somebody. And the first thing you have to be able to ask is, am I capable of killing somebody? Or is that something I can't do? And if you've got doubts, you shouldn't carry a gun, number one. But the thing I get across to my students is, The very, very, very last thing you ever want to do is have to take that gun out and kill somebody.

If you can walk away, walk away. If you can de-conflict, de-escalate. That's got to be your last resort. And instead, for the United States, we get the equivalent of the gun out. Man, we're shooting everybody. And we kill a lot of innocent people in the process. We need to stop. We've had enough.

I have. And look, I've worked in this bureaucracy and say, hey, you're partly responsible for this. Maybe I am. But I've had enough of it. We've seen enough blood. We've seen enough death and destruction. Because, you know, it's not the assholes that end up getting killed and deserve to get it. It's the children.

It's the little old ladies. It's elderly men. It's the people with handicaps, physical and mental. it's it's it's it's inhuman what we're doing animals don't do this to their themselves i'm old enough to remember the term mutually assured destruction do you think that that's where we need to get back to where if one country has such superiority whether it would be militarily whether it would be technologically, that if you just have this race that keeps going, it seems like when we had that race, there was a lot less war. There was, when there was no, when there was less of a financial

interest, like, you know, when the Soviet Union falls, Pat Buchanan said, we just need to become the shining city on the hill, concentrate on ourselves, but we needed to go find other, other devils to fight, and they turned into fighting Islam. It seems to me that if, if we just concentrate on technology and going forward, I think technology is where it's at going forward, whether it be AI, whether it be quantum computing, whether it be missiles that can change direction in midair. I think that that's something that we should, would you disagree that the United States should be if Russia has this technology, then we should be able to at least match it. And then if we match it and we're constantly in this race, it sort of keeps,

it keeps our mind off of fighting each other. It just turns into like this, this technological race kind of, kind of future. Well, actually, I think, I think there's some ways that we could, we need to learn how to cooperate. But, but look, you know, the United States has fallen so far behind in this. I mean, our educational system is wreck. The Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, hell, kids in India, at least at the upper middle class, they're getting a much better education, much more, you know, they're not worried about learning their pronouns. They're worried about learning how to do calculus. It is true that the United States up until recently was always the leader in some innovation. but part of that innovation was always it was coming from if you will immigrants

I don't know if it was a fabricated meme but the one that showed the the US teenage national math team that won the math Olympics they're all Chinese they're all Chinese they had the racial physical character of Chinese nationals the the United States is out of touch with the modern world. And we've gotten lazy with our reliance on the technology, but the actual production of it, you know, the chips are being produced in Taiwan, not here.

And Russia is stepping up its production of chips, despite our, you know, propaganda that they were having to scavenge for chips and washing machines and refrigerators in order to put them into missiles. I mean, it's just ridiculous stuff. But our actual physical production plant capability in this country has been decimated. It was, you know, during World War II, one of the things that made the United States come out on top

was the fact that we had all of this idle industrial production that was then, boy, juiced up. and what it could produce was just phenomenal in terms of planes, tanks, vehicles, ammunition, ships of all varieties. You know, you could build it back then. I think the aircraft carriers could be constructed in two or three months.

Hell, now we're lucky if we can get one built in five or six years. You know, just the time difference. And I've, you know, people listen to me on other podcasts I mean, you get tired of hearing me tell this story, but I just, I was back at my high school reunion on October 7th of 20, 23 of all dates. And, you know, I was talking to some of my buddies, you know, so we're all 69 years of age now. And we were reflecting back when we graduated from high school 50 years ago, 51 years ago. And at the time, my father was a foreman and a steel plant. Co. Steel, previously known as Sheffield Steel.

One of my other buddies, Joe, his dad was a foreman at Standard Oil Corporation, which they had an actual oil refining facility there next to Independence in Sugar Creek, Missouri. Others worked at Bendix Corporation. Others were employed at Alice Chalmers, which made farm implements. Others were employed at the GM Leeds plants. All of those plants are gone. now. They've gone with them with the jobs, the income and the expertise. Now the United States is offshort so much of that that in the event that we got into a war or had to actually

produce something, we'd be hard for us to do it. We still got a little bit of it in this country, but not near what we had before. That's why you're seeing, you know, that's what this war in Ukraine is exposed, has exposed the weakness of the supply chain of the U.S. military. Yeah, well, I've said, been saying the first thing that the way we get out of this is we have to start manufacturing our own things. We have to start concentrating on educating people. 50, 60 years ago, the government would have been plucking people like Elon Musk and other people out of the population and saying, look, you have to come work for us. We need the most brilliant minds so that we can get things done and we can move into,

we can move into the future. And they just don't do that anymore. It's just turned into this nepotistic, basically welfare state where you're just siphoning off all, you know, people want to complain about $3.8 billion going to Israel every year. Money doesn't go to Israel. It goes to the military industrial complex, which is American for the most of, part, and then they send those weapons to Israel. So it's just a, it's a cycle.

Yes. No, I fully agree. It is, and used the right term, it's incest. You know, the West Virginia is, you know, ridiculed as being a place of a bunch of inbreds and people marrying their cousins. But when you look at Washington, D.C. for what it is, and I'm talking to political sphere, both within Congress, and within the administrative branch of the executive branch, compared West Virginia looks like an experiment in biodiversity compared to what Washington is. I mean, it's a level of corruption.

And the grift has been made very, very apparent with, you know, the Biden family. But they haven't been the only ones. You know, the Clintons, the Bushes. You know, it's a bipartisan game of incest, that's for sure. All right, well, let's end it there, leave it open for the future. Where can we send people to see anything, anything you want to plug, basically? Sure, yeah, sonar-21.com, S-O-N-A-R-21.com. Stans for son of the New American Revolution, 21st century.

I've got 28 ancestors who fought in the American Revolution. So I am committed to the concepts of freedom, democracy, and liberty in this country. But I fear we have gone astray. And that's why I'm happy to talk with good people like you. Just try to get a message out that, man, let's get back to our roots. Let's rediscover ourselves. I appreciate that. All right.

Thank you very much. Appreciate your time. Thanks, Peter.