The Pete Quiñones Show - The Cold War Series w/ Thomas777 - 2/3

Episode Date: July 6, 2025

5 Hours PG-13Here are episodes 6-10 of the Cold War series with Thomas777.The 'Cold War' Pt. 6 - Ho Chi Minh and the Origin of the Vietnam War w/ Thomas777The 'Cold War' Pt. 7 - Robert McNamara, Vietnam, and a World Turning 'Red' w/ Thomas777The Cold War Pt. 8 - How the On the Ground Battles in Vietnam Were Fought w/ Thomas777The 'Cold War' Pt. 9 - Battling the Khmer Rouge w/ Thomas777The 'Cold War' Pt. 10 - The Vietnam War Comes to an End w/ Thomas777Thomas' SubstackThomas777 MerchandiseThomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 1"Thomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 2"Thomas on TwitterThomas' CashApp - $7homas777Pete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete'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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Volkswagen financial services Ireland limited subject to lending criteria terms and conditions apply Volkswagen financial services are limited trading as Cooper financial services is regulated by the central bank of Ireland I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Cagnonez show continuing the Cold War series with Thomas 777 how are you doing Thomas I'm well thank you man today I wanted to get And then the, this is a somewhat difficult topic to address. I mean,

not for the usual reasons, people bandied that, but because there's so many misconceptions, both on the left and the right and then kind of the sensible center. I'm talking about historians, I mean, and there's still a lot of, people still have a lot of strong feelings about it.

Be that, be that as it may, there's a basic lack of understanding, even among a lot of revisionists, of the kind of broader political context of the war, world in strategic terms and in ideological lines. And what I think of as apoccal terms, I think people who watch our content, they've kind of become habituated to some of my vocabulary.

When I talk about apoccal events, you know, I'm not just trying to draw up on highfalutin language or trying to create my own kind of, you know, revisionist Esperanto. I can't think of a better way to describe what I'm talking about. And that's a rough translation of a phenomenon that Ernst and old. he describes, you know, and it basically the way to understand it is kind of practical zeitgeist, you know,

but that's, I just wanted to kind of clarify that. And, you know, as I've talked about before, as much as much as they esteem guys like Mearsheimer, they're kind of locked, they're kind of boxed in to kind of like the Klausowice and

conceptual cube as it were. You know, like a guy like Mirosheimer, if one wants to understand in terms of predictive modeling, I think there's nobody better than him. And like, for example, like in the run

of the 91 Gulf War, nobody modeled the outcome of that conflict with more accuracy than he did. And in fact, most people were totally off base. He's a Klausowiczian thinker through and through in ways both

praiseworthy as well as not so praiseworthy. But he's so fixated on conceptual modeling and on identifying, like, concrete variables that can be insinuated into that sort of modeling, that he really misses apoccal, like, variables of apoccal significance. Okay. Nowhere's that more clear than in his discussion of the Vietnam War. Mir Shabra is one of these guys on the political right, like at the time and subsequent, you know, he was constantly issuing the assertion that indochina was was strategically without value you know he's got this idea that the global north you know uh western europe uh you know the

united states uh in canada um japan uh korea and some of the some of the upper pacific rim um that that's you know in the middle east that's basically those that's basically those that's basically Geostrategic terms that's the location of the only stakes worth fighting for but that's not why people go to war anymore okay and in fact states

going to war over commodities or you know to dominate trade routes and sea lanes that's really that really reflects kind of a narrow like a narrow kind of narrow

a piece of the modern era, you know, wherein that kind of power political competition, you know, translated very much to the concrete, the need to capture sort of concrete, um, um, um, resources,

you know, so, uh, it didn't, it didn't matter that Vietnam, the Vietnam were happening in Vietnam. You know, if it had happened in Nicaragua,

if it had happened in, um, you know, if it had happened in, um, in Greece, if it had happened, uh,

in Borneo like it would not have mattered you know that's that's where the communist pushed um that's where politics kind of conspired and intrigued

you know for for for great powers to come together in hostile terms um and that's where America staked uh the line in the sand so it didn't matter all right this is where communism

fought um you know the uh the American let opposition you know what what it would what it would what it would that self-identified is the free world and that's what people like that's what people in the right miss okay i think um people on the left in contrast you know what they teach college kids you know bullshit promulgated by people like chomsky or by um people like howards in where they claim that like well the vietnam war was just you know the pentagon like murder machine profiting that's not really true i mean the the the um there was a kind of the logic of

the body count did become kind of a instead of into itself and that's perverse in all kinds of ways. But that's kind of the case in modern war in the 20th century. And I'm getting into that in the manuscript and right now about Nuremberg because about half of it gets into the 20th century generally. And yeah, there was, you know, there was all, anytime there's a general war on it and Vietnam was a general war.

you had a draft you had real casualties you know America was mobilized anyway wanting to the situation in Europe and the ongoing the ongoing strategic challenge

presented by the Warsaw Pact but I mean anytime you're dealing with a general war situation or conditions you know with on that spectrum there's going to be people and agents and and companies that profit from that.

Okay, but that's not, that's not the incentive. Okay, like, you know, America didn't kill three million people and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, essentially, like, imposed, like, a decade-long recession on itself, just so that it could, like, sell helicopters to the Pentagon, you know, or so that cold could, you know, manufacture the arm of light and everybody makes money from, you know, outfell. the U.S. Army with the shit that it needs. Like, that's just every basic view of things,

and that's not reality. And it's something I emphasize to be able to, and it's hard to be able to put themselves in, in this kind of conceptual mindset because, you know, the Cold War is, like, receding, like, out of living memory, but there was real stakes to warfare in the 20th century. I mean, that's not to say there weren't reckless decisions made.

and it's not to say that during the Cold War you know men in the Pentagon and command roles and in the Department of State didn't intriguing inspire to go to war when it wasn't absolutely the you know essential course of action but this was taken very seriously because there was real consequences but also you had a real coterie of public intellectuals

shaping defense policy you know and you really did have a lot of the best and the brightest putting their minds to the waging of warfare, you know, on the technical side at Los Alamos would be the zenith of that, you know, and people quite literally developing, you know, more and more effective nuclear weapons. But, you know, you had, like,

I mean, the point of people a lot, if this was 1970 or 1980, a guy like Elon Musk could be working on SDI. You know, you'd have guys who are going to work on Wall Street now as quads. You know, they'd be working for the Pentagon or the Department of State. where they'd be working for these NGOs, you know, to figure out how to, how to wage World War III.

You know, you didn't just have these idiots and these, these, like, these, like, abject losers, like, like Pete Buttigig, where the fuck his name is. You know, these other freaks that, you know, he's had in Washington since 1993, you know, just kind of deciding that, you know, we're going to generally deploy in some theater for no particular reason. I mean, that did not happen in the Cold War because it couldn't happen.

And it just wouldn't have been like unthinkable. You know, the degree to which there's a paradigm shift in the public mind. It can't be over-emphasized. But what I want to get into today, I want to get into the political background of Vietnam and why it became such a critical theater. And then next episode, like I said before, we went live. You know, we'll get into the battlefield situation because that's an important topic. It's not just, I mean, I'm not a military guy, and I mean, it's not really my wheelhouse.

But I do know something about military science topics in a very, like, abstract sense. I mean, I don't have experience like brunch to or something. I would not purport to. But the kind of competing, I want to get into Westmoreland versus Creighton Abrams and their kind of tactical orientation. I want to go guy named John Paul Mann and David Hackworth, you know, both of whom had had profound ideas that they contributed

on asymmetrical warfare and I want to get into why the U.S. Army really couldn't adapt itself. I single out the Army because frankly in the Marine Corps as well as the Air Force like they did adapt pretty well. And in the Air Force the case, it's pretty remarkable

because the Air Force was totally purposed to essentially like drop nuclear ordinance on the Warsaw Pact at that time. and to repurpose their aircraft. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favorite Liddle items

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Cooper. Design that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen financial services areland limited subject to lending criteria terms and conditions apply vogue wagon financial services are limited trading as cooper financial services is regulated by the central bank of arland um you know for essentially you know uh way like like like like like fire support you know um and a conventional bombing role that but but today we're gonna we're gonna talk about politics which isn't as sexy as uh is a

battlefield kind of stuff, but it's essential to understanding it. And in the case of Vietnam, I think it's, I think it's paramount or the military side of things. The seeds of the Indo-China wars, which, I mean, really, we could say that it goes, you know, things come as in 1931. I mean, when the Jav and the Imperial Army assaulted China, but for our purposes, what's conventionally viewed as the Indochial. China Wars is, you know, the French war against the Vietnam that kicked off in 1946. You know, there was the

story defeat that Jim Ben Fu, the Foreign Legion got, you know, surrounded and annihilated. You know, and then the American War, which traditionally is viewed as commencing in 65, because that's when there was the mass conventional buildup. You know, his involvement ended in

73. Saigon fell in 75. I'd include I'd include the the Khmer Rouge conquest of Cambodia within that same conceptual paradigm two, as well as the 1979 war that Vietnam fought against the people of the public of China, which is fascinating.

And that the latter event informs the strategic landscape today in profound ways. I find it fascinating, but actually sensible. And I attribute this to Robert Gates also, who was a rare like sensible man. in in power in policy corridors

you know post 93 but he uh Obama like in my opinion um owing to Gates's tutelage uh lifted remaining restrictions on arm sales to

the people's Republic of Vietnam um very obviously employee Vietnam as a military hedge against the people of Republic of China which is very smart honestly. It jumped out of me because it was one of the few power political moves. It not only made sense,

like rational sense, but actually was strategically sound. And you'd never really see you as government engaged in anything sensible anymore. But, endo China, you know, it really was kind of the jewel of Southeast Asia. You know, there's a reason why the French hung on to it and it wasn't just

prestige and clout the way they did you know vietnam was not just as backwater um it's a comparatively huge country you know a very large population um and it was and it was a cosmopolitan place okay um and in geostrategic terms um like i said again that wasn't paramount but uh a french indochina according to guys who who spent a lot of time spent a lot of time with geopolitics um you know beginning in really in the 19th century like on Crimean War probably around like 1812 final Napoleonic era

is that kind of closed out and Europeans started thinking a lot about about them the then contemporary battlefield people generally associated Indo China with kind of the eastern third of the mainland of Southeast Asia

okay and they viewed it as essential in that regard like I'm not just as like a hedge against the you know powers emergent within the interior but uh you know there's it's um it's you know it's got it's got sea access obviously you know on uh this extensive coast you know things like that so it's americans tend to be kind of geo strategically illiterate and they they also have the tends to dismiss everywhere some backwater and that's that's particularly misguiding as a vietnam like yeah vietnam was largely backwards and that's that's 1965, but most of this planet was backwards in 1965, and those places that weren't, like, a lot of them were still, like, in ruins, because 20 years before, like, you know, the world, they're going to hell in a handbasket. And, you know, and there were some places, including in Europe, mostly behind the wall, but not exclusively, that, I mean, still, like, until 1980s, like, you know, there was visible, like, battle damage from, you know, combat 40 years previously. So, um, that's something to keep.

in mind. The Ho Chi Minh himself was well actually the Milu that Ho Chi Minh came out of the Vietnamese were looking for an identity in peculiar ways and

Vietnam's a complex society. It wasn't like North Korea or something. I don't know if people know the history particularly well. It is strange. But you know Kim Il-sung, you know, who who became Stalin's protege. He was one of the Soviet Koreans. Part of Stalin's

issue with the nationalities was not just genocidal programs against people that he considered to be politically unreliable, but also trying to simulate populations that he considered to be useful

into kind of the Soviet sphere of influence in his Soviet life. Well, the Koreans and the Soviet Far East, he considered to be one of these populations. And Kim Il-sung really had no interest or in or understanding of communism. And if you look at North Korea

today, like they, you know, it's this kind of like pastiche of like 1950 Stalinism and kind of cargo cult a military dictatorship type of the 1980s or something. It's also a hereditary.

It's like a hereditary dictatorship, which I think Stalin had told them you can't you can't do that and they were like screw you. Yeah, yeah.

They're just going to do what we want. Yeah, exactly. But people have this like people tend to send me to like transposed that those kinds of tendencies to places like Vietnam, which is very, very misguided. And like among other things, I'm sure

I'm some people are going to claim that this is me being like a chauvinistic white man or whatever. I mean, I obviously don't care, but I colonized peoples, they tend to take on the characteristics of their colonizers, okay? And the French are very sophisticated people, okay? I'm not saying that the Vietnamese otherwise would be stupid or something. I find that VSA actually be very interesting. That's why, as people, I've included, Vietnam features heavily in my fiction,

as people will see you in the second book drops. but um you know so vietnam like any place whether it's algeria or vietnam or anywhere or morocco that was you know colonized by the french it was it was not going to it was not going to be some backwater like north korea okay i mean regardless even if what the german would call the mention material was was not particularly i'm trying to be delegate here was not particularly capable of human stock okay but the vietnamese um you know they're uh there uh there's are relatively creative people. And Ho Chiman himself,

he was the son of a Confucian scholar. And he was a mysterious guy. His birth years generally accepted as 1890, but that's never been verified conclusively. A lot of sources, both within Vietnam and without, like claim other years. His father and his family, like, lived in central Vietnam, which was kind of like a husband.

of culture as well as political activity and this endured through like the American War in Vietnam but it oh into his dad his father's prestige you know not just as an intellectual but

he was this he was a kind of like he was an imperial magistrate like the when Vietnam became technically an empire like after the Japanese deposed like the French in

1945 this was before the war on it it was the Vichy regime and

and the 13th emperor of Vietnam who who stepped down who advocated in 55 but be as it

made there was an imperial court and Hoachim his father he was like this he was like

one half like cop one half judge kind of and he was demoted because

for abuse of power after some influential local hancho was available to summary punishment in Ho's father's core

and he was sentenced to something crazy like a hundred lashes with a cane you know and he and the guy died okay so so OCHiman's dad was I mean he was something I mean he loomed large to say the least

and he was basically a judge and an intellectual and a confusion a judge intellectual and a priest kind of, I mean, Confucianism is kind of confusing to the Western mind, including mine own, but, you know, this was not, Hoichmann was not some guy of peasant stock, like, quite the contrary. Hocheon did kind of rewrite his biography, as communists all kind of did, and, I mean, to be fair, partisans all do that to some degree, even Cromwell did that.

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2000 euro. Search Coopera and discover our latest offers. Coopera. Design that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. he claimed Ho Chiman claimed that he was radicalized in 1908 when, because he was sent to Hui City to study, okay?

And he said he came across his demonstration of these poor peasants who were bound in this kind of peculiar form of serfdom that existed in Southeast Asia. I can't remember what the French word is for it, but it was basically like think of a surf who's

bound to the land and who's not compensated for his labor, but he's like paying rent on his occupation of the land which he can't leave. This was a big deal in Vietnam especially. And there was this, there was this, there was this, there was this demonstration that,

that the Imperial Court cracked out on violently. And, you know, social justice types of the day, including a lot of Catholics, because, you know, obviously, you know, Catholic missioners were reactive in Indochina, or one of the French

regime. but as well as well as it's kind of the socialist international this was like a big deal and ho claimed like well this is when i realized like i was a communist okay i mean well that's true or not who knows but um he was mired in a revolutionary environment um owing to the fact uh owing to his family's downer mobility and no small measure because of the scandal with his father and and this uh this canning victim who died oh realized that he wasn't going to be able to he wasn't going to be able to get a job, you know, with the imperial court. And he said he refused to try and work, you know,

in the colonial administration because he refused to serve the French. And that's probably true. So what he did do was he applied to work on a French merchant ship when he got to Saigon. And in 1911,

he traveled first to France. and then he ended up in Dunkirk. He hop back and forth between the UK and Marseille for a few years. And then from 1913 to 1919, he was in London. It's disputed by some these days, but there's actually a plaque in the New Zealand House in London, which houses literally, you know, like the New Zealander diplomatic mission that said that like Ho Chi men worked here as like some kind of pastry chef, okay?

So, I mean, he was moving. in pretty elite circles, you know, albeit in a, in a kind of, in a, in a kind of menial role, but, I mean, he was a young guy, so it wasn't something that would have been seen as improper for a guy of his station, and he wouldn't

just be viewed as like a coolly, you know, because he was, I mean, he was even, he was very young, okay, even though he was a teenager in early 20s. I mean, even though we don't know his precise birthday, I mean, how much it's clear. In 1919, mean, he returned to France in part because a French socialist named Marcel

Kachin, I'm sure I'm torturing that pronunciation, as I often do, excuse me. He was an activist in the socialist party of France. What Kachin essentially convinced Ho of was he said, look, you know, the Versailles the Versailles summit, this is our chance to approach the allied leaders, you know, about freedom for Indochina. You know, because now they'll be receptive, you know, not owing to any particular, you know, interest in our cause, but because, you know, something's going to have to, you know, replace the imperial regime. And, like, even they have to see that, you know. and part of this

part of this was kind of rigid marcus you know thinking deterministic rather thinking like you know this is you know like reading the proverbial signs you know like like an augur would

like obviously this is you know a crucial moment in the advance of history you know we we've got to get the attention to these men because um capitalists though they are you know oppressors as they though they are you know they're

they're nonetheless you know they're nonetheless serving uh the cause of history as a whole men are you know it um i mean this is all very clear to people kind of understand a marxist ontology such that it can be said to exist um but jim and subsequently claim that what drove drew him to paris initially was that he'd uh was that he he joined the group of Vietnamese patriots uh that would have translated to the um again i can't i i can't pronounce the the the

French moniker, but it was this group that had coalesced in Paris, you know, most mostly are in university environments, but they all, they did have some power within the syndic,

within the cynicalist unions that had, and there was a number of of Asian workers, like, who were present on the ground. I mean, obviously, because, you know, the French empire was always, was always, was always, was always hungry for menial laborers, menial laborers from the

outer dominions but this particular faction it included basically the guys who became kind of like the core of the Vietnamese nationalist movement okay including fan chutrin

fan van trong these names probably don't mean anything to anybody today but they were in the interwar years and into the first French and no China war. These guys constituted an early cadre of the political leadership cast

resisting French control, political and military. These were heavy people, okay? And I mean, undoubtedly, Ho was able to finagle that, like, only to his background. You know, I mean, he downplayed his privilege and everything like that, but he, I mean,

he was a guy who was, I mean, a guy who was, I mean, a Again, his father was a very esteemed individual, as well as Owing to Ho's Confucian education. You know, he would have had to be, he would have mastered colloquial Vietnamese in a way that most people just would not. You know, he developed aptitude in French. You know, he knew Chinese letters because you had to study Confucian text. You know, I mean, he was, he was very, very well situated to take it to, to, to, to, to, to, you know to to make contact with revolutionary cadres particularly in uh particularly in uh in uh interwar uh france but uh and hoe uh and his uh his comrades they actually they formally sent their

letter to uh to the allied delegation you know clemence so Woodrow wilson um they were unable to obtain any consideration But what it did do was it, I attribute this the fact that Ho was very, he was comfortable with Westerners, he was familiar with them, as well as his French was, was beyond competent. It was probably not absolutely fluent, but it was far more so than, you know, your average, your average Oriental at that time that, you know, you'd run into in Europe. Hocci men begin identified as the leader of the anti-colonial movement in Vietnam for better or worse and we've discussed in the course of our

you know of our discussions and I've made the point myself for Pied on my pod in my long form a lot of what role any man becomes insinuated into regardless of his aptitude or ambition I'm talking politically particularly as revolutionary

if people decide that you know you are the leader well than you are in some real sense. Okay. And this, the Versailles delegation identifying how, even though they effectively snubbed him, the fact that they identified him as the leader of the Vietnamese resistance, I'd say that that's what launched his career as a,

as a professional revolutionary. Is there, is there any evidence of like who he was reading, who he was most inspired, inspired by? That's a good question. I speculate despite the fact

and this is going to seem strange particularly because most people who are familiar with the French left not just younger people I mean people might be a little bit older maybe the French left

is kind of the driving force behind the 608ers and the kind of break with the Warsaw Pact and you know the kind of, you know, the new left was literally founded by Foucault, at least in, in Akadine. However, in the inner war years, particularly at the time of Versailles,

the French, the French communists were very, very orthodox Marxist-Leninists. They very much believed in the common turn in its orthodoxy, probably even more so than anybody probably even more so than the Germans because there was one of the reasons why the SED, not the KPD began the ruling

party in East Germany was because the Social Democrats and the Marxist Leninists could never come to the table. France did not really have that problem. Yes, France was a... I mean, I say France was a House divided quickly. I mean, it would be a gross understatement, but the French communist

for whatever reason they i owe it's just i i owe this phenomenon to very strong cadre building um they were very very much united um and uh i would speculate and again i'd have to deep dive into it and it would be very hard i think i mean it could be done but it would take time to kind of tease out real data on what the primary sources were but whether we're talking about palpott or hoci men or Giop who who Ho Chi men had met at Hue

when he was a student there all these guys either only did the fact that they were in France or you know only to the French influence upon their cadre structure like in Indochina

they'd be reading Marx and Lenin you know and they and they'd be reading you know they'd be reading Hegel and they'd be reading Hagel and they would have become familiar with Aristotle

and they would have become and Thomas Payne and Locke but they like Markson Lennon would be their you know their Bible as it were but yeah that's a great question and it's kind of a fascinating subject especially like again

you know like we just mentioned it's uh like imagining the French left is kind of like the standard bearer of you know rigid orthodoxy is kind of hilarious but I mean that's that's that's the way it was um

excuse me the uh um this is actually what gives rise the myth I don't know I don't know how much this is bandied about by court historians these days because frankly I don't read a lot of court history

um on uh on either World War one or on the Cold War I mean any more and what I do for like for dedicated purposes like in my writing and research you know like if I say like

okay well you know I like refresh my recollection with what uh you know with what kind of like the mainstream historians of the day we're saying about like say like the french war in Algeria you know and then you know so not just for the sake like teeing off on that but just kind of you know get a sense of what people take for granted um in terms of kind of the not not just not just the key events that they identify as as being essential to understanding um the conflict but also kind of like you know what what sort of values are in assinuated into the narrative, you know, in, in deliberate hindsight. But when I was, like, when I was high school age, if you read, like, a college textbook,

or like, if you took, like, you know, an international relations class in your high school, it'd say that, oh, you see, you know, in 1919, there was this Wilsonian moment where, you know, Ho Chi Minh, he could have adopted a pro-American stance. if only Wilson had paid attention to him, but, you know, because, you know, these like mean white men, we're just, like, being mean and racist, like, this didn't happen. Like, I think that that's nonsense for all kinds of reasons. I mean, first of all, it's, like, kind of sending it's fucking stupid, but also, um,

um, it really kind of sells people like Ho Chiman short. Ho Chiman wasn't there to be a cooey and, like, grovel for, you know, towing concessions. he basically sent he basically penned this document and Owen to his influence of

kind of his French patrons who were experienced revolutionaries they seem to think that Wilson would recognize Wilson and Clemenceau would recognize they didn't know China was going to be a significant

potential battle theater okay there was nothing friendly about this communication you know and this idea And this idea that everybody, if you give Hocci men a Coke and a Snickers bar or Hershey or pat him on the head, they'll give you a buck tooth grin and say, I love GI Joe, Coca-Cola. Like, that's way more quote-unquote racist than anything in Wilson's mind. This brings us to, I realize I'm jumping around a lot, but as we get into this further, like I think I shall be redeemed because people will understand.

And I want to get out of the way now, because I'm going to reference a lot of these things, as we get into kind of the hard and fast strategic analysis of the conflict. And I don't have to keep jumping back and saying, well, this is what this was. People talk all the time about how Vietnam was like this grave kind of failure

of collective security. And why do they say that? Well, they say that because of CETO. S-A-T-O. Like, what was CETO? Cito is the Southeast Asian treaty organization. And if you think it sounds a lot like NATO, you'd be right. because that's what its whole notion was.

It was created by the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty, also known as the Manila pact. It was signed in September 1954, and you guessed it, Manila, the Philippines. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favorite Liddle items,

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So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i. 4.4-Northwest. Now, who is the driving force behind CETO? It was Vice President Nixon, who upon returning from Asia 953, said, look, we need some kind of collective security arrangement in Asia that, you know, tantamount to NATO. there was far more confidential conflict diets in Asia the strategic landscape was a lot more fluid and Nixon realized that but at the same time he said that

one of the reasons it's impossible to you know develop a meaningful kind of strategic posture moving forward is because it's uncertain like what any what if anything you know anyone's willing to commit and what they're willing to stand on as essential interests and

this creates a credibility problem. George Kennan also was very much behind this idea, if not CETO itself. He said there's got to be some kind of collective security structure of a formal nature. Now, I make this point a lot as people for a few reasons.

People act like NATO was this magical thing that I mean obviously anybody who claims NATO actually still exists, is a fucking moron. But also, such that it does exist, it's profoundly destabilizing. But we don't know

if NATO was effective or not. What we do know is that there was basic credibility behind it. And the Soviet Union considered America, you know, to represent a credible threat, you know, if

if the private conflict diet in Europe was triggered, you know, which was obviously the inter-German border. but at the same time America periodically had to meet Soviet efforts to decouple European

collective security from American strategic interests was one reason why America maintained intermediate nuclear forces in Europe. That's another question and that's a complicated issue. We'll get into that. My point is that it's not treaties themselves

that promotes stability it's the willingness of the signatories you know in order to it's the willingness of the signatories I say it was credibility there in okay and it should be obvious where the signatories to Cito it was Australia, France, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand, the United Kingdom and the USA

okay I might add this out of those signatories Australia New Zealand came show up to fight the Vietnam War France had just fought the Vietnam for eight years and been defeated. Thailand was definitely a combatant in the Vietnam War. I mean, this was very much below board in terms of their special operations forces who were very effective. But Thailand unconditionally availed their bases and their airspace to do anything that the Allies needed.

and the UK the UK just this caused great consternation Anthony Eden profoundly offended the US Department of State of the era and by essentially making it clear

that the UK would not come into any kind of collective security arrangement as regards to Indochina why they put pen to paper on the Manila pack that's another question that's kind of complicated. It owed kind of the weasel words inherent to

to diplomats, I think. I don't have some kind of hatred of of a, of, I don't have some kind of hatred of diplomats in and of themselves, but there is a kind of lawyer ball they play about

qualifying their willingness to utter tree allegations. And in the case, of the UK deciding on with CETO, it had a lot to do with claims of, well, this is a, quote, defensive alliance, I mean, which is meaningless and war in peace, as Carl Smith taught us. There's no other thing as an offensive or defensive war. All wars are both offensive and defensive, but that's a bit outside the scope. In any event, it was CETA was headquartered in Bangkok, Thailand, incidentally, too.

And again, Dolis, John Foster Dulles was 100% behind it, too. In fact, he could be viewed as kind of the primary architect. Like I said, Nixon was convinced a formal collective security arrangement was necessary. Modeled roughly on NATO. Dulles was the one who pushed for Cito as the answer to that. And it was Dulles who, who, who, who, uh, who, uh, who was profoundly offended by Eden's and willing this to commit.

It was interesting. And it goes to the quote special relationship between the United States and the UK. I mean, there were people in the UK who had to fag realized the UK lost World War II. Eden's a complicated figure. A year later in 1995, like Eden became Prime Minister, but that's

he's one of the more interesting post-war British executives, I think. But as it may, like he made a clear that the UK was was was was going to sit out anything that happened in in in southeast Asia and it's an interesting question um you know I mean the obviously neither eaten nor anybody else was a kind of auger but um you know war literally came to the UK's

doorstep uh in northern Ireland and uh the revisional IRAs efforts were very much perceived as as part of the anti-colonial movement, okay? I mean, I don't want to start some big controversy with people. I'm not sitting here saying that Athenians are a bunch of communists or something like that, okay? But at point being, um,

everything all's aside, even if, even if, even if, even if there's been some kind of hawkish, uh, like proto Thatcher type, um, at Downing Street. I don't, the situation that they actually developed in the UK in the 60s, I don't think they were in a position to be they'll be fighting some general war

against, you know, North Vietnam and, you know, halfway across the planet. But as in as it is it counterfactual. The background of what immediately gave rise to CETO from

April 26th until July 20th, 954, there was a Geneva conference on the status of Indochina. Like, why was this convened? Well, the French had, you know, had just taken a defeat

by the Vietmen at Yemben Fu, which I would say was, other than Singapore, you know, where the Javis Imperial Army just, just like, smashed the United Kingdom. Singapore's most devastating defeat ever levied

to a white Western power. by a rising a rising non-Western state. Diemben Fu was the second. The psychological impact on this was devastating. And the Vietnamese showed that they were a martial race. They manhandled artillery up the mountainside

and bombarded the French positions. The the Vietnamese have a genuine, they've got a genuine aptitude for war. We'll get into that in the next episode as we get into the kind of battlefield realities of the war. That aside, the characteristics of the Vietz themselves aside, you know, France, France was a real military power in those days, okay, too. They weren't slouches, you know, and they weren't, they weren't, you know, the France of 1954 wasn't the France of today. you know, this wasn't some half-ass army of mercenaries or something either.

I mean, it was the French Foreign Legion, you know, and these were crack troops, you know, highly motivated. Arguably, arguably the best equipped the army on the planet at that point. You know, I was comparable, you know, the United States, the year they was comparable with the United States was fighting with in Korea. You know, after mobilization kicked off. earnest, but be as it may, there's a need of a conference in the status of China. Half of,

it was purposed, half of it was purposed to deal with issues resolving from the Korean war, you know, in the and the armistice, and half was to kind of resolve the French and no China situation, which is a recipe

for disaster to begin with, okay, like, you don't take that approach to you know, just say, yeah, we're going to We're going to knock out two words of one stone with this great conference. And, you know, we're just, we're just going to figure out, you know, based the whole status of Asia by, you know, putting the right, you know, putting it, put it, you know, putting the right, um, putting the right paperwork together. I mean, all the thing's ridiculous.

Uh, delegation, the delegations, um, uh, we represented on the status of Korea. It was the Soviet Union, the people's Republic of China, North and South Korea. and the USA and the Indo-Tunitas side of the... Employers, rewarding your staff? Why choose between a shop voucher or a Spend Anywhere card when with Options Card, you can have both. With Options Card, your team gets the best of both worlds. They can spend with Ireland's favourite retailers

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difference between the value of your cover and the cost of repairing damage or replacing contents. It's a risk you can avoid. Review your home insurance policy regularly. For more, visit Standing Insurance.I.E. forward slash under insurance. Brought to you by Insurance Ireland. The conference was France. The Vietmin, although a non-state actor, they had former representation. The USSR, the USA, the people's public in China,

the UK, and the nascent, the, the, maybe the beleaguered, I should say, successor government in Vietnam to what had been the Bishi regime. That was deposed by Japan, which, as I indicated, at the start of this conversation, at the start of this talk,

only had a year to remain. In 1995, there was the referendum and the emperor stepped down. And Baudai was the emperor, to be replaced by Diem. What was the sense of Vietnam and I mean before? Well, there was two regimes of Vietnam.

There's the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, led by the Communist Workers Party, and the state of Vietnam, again, lived by Emperor Baudai. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam was strongest in the north and in the center of the country, but it had some followers in the South as well. So basically what you're talking about is,

you're talking about a country that's a political map of it almost like leopard spots at this point. Okay. And the seat of sovereignty that's claimed by the emperor is really a sovereign in name only, okay? At the time of the French defeat,

65,000 documented members of the Workers' Party went south of the 17th parallel, which is what became the divider between North and South Vietnam. In the Mekong Delta region alone, which is in northern south vietnam so i mean a key strategic piece of real estate there was 30 000 party members concentrated um in addition there was 100 000 others in the south who were you know

sympathized with the vietnam or who were you know just uh you know um card-carrying communists of varying stripes in short uh the uh the the democratic republic of Vietnam, which whose sole representative was the communist. They could claim membership throughout the entire country. Okay. The formal

state of Vietnam, led by the emperor, part of the problem with this was part of the problem of the characteristic of those resisting the communist movement globally. You were looking at a house divided. You know,

the war had, the World War II had destroyed the right for all time. There was no, there was no real political right anymore, okay? There's reactionary elements, you know, who backs people like Emperor Baudai, you know, in various monarchists. You know, there was people who didn't really have

a political consciousness, but they, you know, they were hostile to communists for self-interested reasons. You know, there wasn't, there wasn't, there wasn't, there's not really corraling these people. You know, like you can't build a movement, particularly when you're facing off against dedicated cadres. You can't just build a, you can't just build a political and, you can't, you can't build a political army based on opposition to something. You know what

I mean? That was, that more, nowhere was that more evident than Vietnam. And I think that can't really be overstated because the, uh, the Vietnamese who resisted the communists really do get kind of bum rap. You know, they're either cast as as cowards or just, you know, you know, these kind of these kind of third world

kleptomaniacs or just, you know, pitiable kind of lackeys and coolies. Like, that's not the case at all. I mean, they were a mixed bag, but there were, they had disadvantages from

jump. And the people who should have been looking out for their interests, most aggressively were not doing so. I think on the military side, I think they were. There was plenty of American commanders in South Korea. And South Korea really came to fight in the Vietnam War. They deployed their force levels around 50,000 men. Her country's size of Korea, it's a major deployment.

But on the military side, you got some very game commanders who very much wanted, you know, to give the, the, the South, me is what they needed to win. And led these guys into combat very bravely. And these guys performed well with honor. But on the political side, you know, it's like what? What do you have in South? What do you have in what became South Vietnam?

It's like, okay, you got a cadre of like kind of upperly mobile or a co-degree kind of like upperly mobile Catholic types, which the French were still here. you know you got you you get you get guys are basically small businessmen who don't like the commies to take their stuff you know uh you got the buddhists were kind of like put upon by everybody you know you got various minorities like a montan yards all in sundry who you know realize their numbers off if the communists win but i mean there is i know it probably sounds like somebody who's like totally fixated um owing to um you know kind of the the central my research being Nuremberg and kind of the political theoretical trajectory of things subsequent. But America's problems in the Cold War really can be chalked up with the fact that, you know, it's like, well, you know, waging a war of extermination against the political right, like, it's not, that doesn't, that you're not lividable to hovel out when you're trying to draw upon your own cadres to defeat the communists. and in Vietnam that's

a topic that's not particularly emphasized, but I think it's more important than in some theaters. Like, legit. I, um, it's, uh, and as we'll get into, like, later in the series, America learned its lesson in part

by, uh, the final phase of the Cold War. And that's one of the reasons why the um the um the uh that the contras are so effective in places like nicaragua where uh honestly um the uh the san an eastern eastern eastern eastern eastern eastern eastern eastern eastern easternmostre state of the regime than the uh the uh the um I mean. But it, in any

event, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

all it, all it, all it did was, it formalized, it, it, it, it, it,

it, it, it, it, it, it, it was already burning. Um, you know, even in,

uh, even before the French had been, had been defeated at the DM-Ben-Fu. But what it did was, it created this kind of, arbitrary dividing line to create kind of the fiction that, you know,

there was two sovereign states here that were at war. And like, that was never, that was never the cake. I mean, the Vietnam War was a civil war. I mean, there's not me,

there's not me having sympathy for the double or, or, you know, trying to simplify the political and strategic situation. A civil war doesn't seem to be a civil war because,

um, great powers, you know, converge, and draw like an imaginary line on the center of the country. That's quite literally what happened. The fact that you had, you know, we'll get into this too.

You know, North Vietnam was a crack army. It was an incredibly game forest as well as like a truly conventional army. This idea that Vietnam was just kind of like weird guerrilla war, like that's bullshit. Yeah, there was aspects of asymmetrical war, particularly in the Mekong Delta. and particularly early on. Make no mistake. The reason why Vietnam was so bloody and so brutal was because it was a conventional war where firepower carried the day.

The North Vietnamese, the only way that they could accomplish their political objectives was through a conventional military victory and they knew that. This is one of the reasons why. America deployed so heavily the way that they did. Was that misguided? Not in and of itself, but we're going to get into why that didn't produce the results that it had to.

But this is also another example of how this, whether or not we accept the kind of, whether or not we accept that, quote, democracy is utilized, at present and even during the Cold War, when it actually had, you know, some kind of identifiable meaning, even if it was only like contra-Marxist-Leninism, I return to kind of the Schmidian notion that it doesn't do you any good at war to have this kind of ongoing discussion in policy terms, because even if people are doing so in good faith, which they never

are, because this becomes another means of exploiting. grid is powering up the Northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say, online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i.4 slash northwest. Inflation pushes up building costs, so it's important to review your home insurance cover to make sure you have the right cover for your needs. Underinsurance happens where there's a difference between the value of your cover

and the cost of repairing damage or replacing contents. It's a risk you can avoid. Review your home insurance policy regularly. For more, visit Understandinginsurance.I.E. forward slash underinsurance, brought to you by Insurance Ireland. Divisions within the electorate for some sort of competitive advantage. But even if that were not the case, you know, you don't endlessly debate military questions as if they're, you know, ordinary policy matters. And the fact that that's what a general war became led to some really perverse outcomes, both on the battlefield, and in terms of what can to be considered,

success in political terms. And I think Vietnam was a rare situation where the political and the military questions were basically synonymous. And the Pentagon on some level recognize that. But the way they proceeded in actual policy terms, whereas if these were two discrete things that had success metrics independent of one another, if that makes any sense. I'm going to know more of what I mean in the next episode when some concrete examples emerged as to how this phenomenon played out.

But ultimately, and I'm going to wrap this up in a minute, what the Geneva Accord led to was this fiction of two Vietnam's, okay? and it created a pathway or at least a roadmap to unification that was supposed to obviate any potential crisis of authority. But it was contingent upon in plain language, you know, both purported sovereign governments advocating any use of, armed force in order to affect a political outcome and dominate the future state by way of a single party regime. And obviously, you know, the Hanoy government always claimed that the Viet Cong or the National Liberation Front was independent of their authority. It was a spontaneous uprising. There was some truth to that. But obviously, Hanui Kodry, were operationally insinuated into the NLF. The Saigon regime always maintained that, you know, the NLF was nothing but a direct client of Hanoi,

and that so long as it existed, it constituted a terrorist threat to the unification process. And so none of the terms of the Geneva Agreement had to be honored. So, I mean, this outcome was entirely predictable. okay i mean there's there's basically no way that um there's basically no way that any other any other outcome would have been emerging but that's that's why the kind of political

foundation was so murky and and kind of unworkable you know it um and also got to show you that you know i make this point a lot there's i generally don't engage people because it's just like bad faith bullshit but people without knowing what they're talking about like those were like you know they wanted a bad about colonialism and how bad this was it's like

okay so you really think what i just described here like you really think that's superior to having like the french administering vietnam like i i mean like in what way she performed you know um and you could say that um well that was just another example of you know white westers imposing this paradigm like it really wasn't man i mean the reason why it was so dysfunctional and fubar is because you did have Beijing like having their say. You did have Moscow having their say and obviously you know in having their say

they were deliberately sabotaging the proceedings and creating conditions wherein you know a cadre based movement could you know effectively sabotage any government that emerged in the south but you can't you can't just

you can't just shut down a conversation myself oh that's just like something the white man imposed on into China you know so it's everybody's always people act like this kind of you know people act like the 19th century regime that endured really till 19, 1990, 20. I mean like

Britain, France, Germany, you know, dividing up the world in these in these key theaters. Like, was this like a a bottom situation? It's like, well, what's your alternative? They're like, they never, they never have one.

You know, it's like, it's idea like the world's kind of exists and sit to and like it's like a place of plenty in peace, but then people screwed up just by like imposing politics upon it. It's like, I think ontologically, like, I think people just like don't, like a lot of people,

even people aren't particularly dumb. They just like can't grasp like the ontological reality of politics. I mean, I don't know, but in any event, let's, let's, um, let's wrap up for now because,

uh, I, I want to shift gears with what we get to do next. And I really, this might have been a little bit dry, but again, like I said, I'm going to reference all this stuff.

when we get into the um the uh the uh you know discussing the battlefield situation and uh and kind of of the political uh maneuverings of mr kennedy and mr johnson mr nixon so it becomes important but yeah i i hope uh eliz didn't bore people at death they hope they got something out of it um relating to the topic so just run through your uh anything you want to promote and we'll go yeah yeah indeed I mean, good things are happening. We, you know, like I said, within the next week or so,

we're launching the YouTube channel at one last. Steel Storm 2 is dropping this month to be on the lookout for that. I've got some big stuff happening on the podcast, but I'm going to announce that formally on the next pod episode, which are going to become more frequent. But you'll, you'll,

I don't want to, I want to get into that, like on the pod. But yeah, that's all I got. You can find me on Twitter at Triskelyan Jihad. The T is a 7. Find me at Substack, Real Thomas

7777.com. Thomas, I appreciate it. Until the next time. Yeah, like I was. Thank you, people. This is part 7 of the Cold War series. Thomas 777. How are you doing? Hello, everybody. I'm okay, man.

Today, the issue with the Vietnam conflict is we kind of got into last episode. It's not just that the sort of controversy around it that endorsed to this day, you know, in terms of ethics and in terms of policy critiques. I mean, some of that is contrived, some of it's not. But even if we take people's sort of values and partisan ideas out of the equation entirely, the Vietnam conflict straddled for like a better way to characterize it or describe it in multiple epochs. in in terms of political and military affairs. You know, as Vietnam jumped off in earnest, as we'll get into what, which was very much during the Kennedy administration,

I know some people have this sort of like, you know, this revisionist notion that O. Kennedy was trying to disengage from Vietnam. That's not true at all. But even if, regardless of that, a paradigm shift in military affairs was underway from the post-new law. Eisenhower era, you know, which was kind of bookended by the Cuba crisis, which, you know, put an end of that kind of thinking. You know, and from that kind of like the first phase of the American War, you know, like 62 to 65, I guess you could say, represented, you know, that is sort of a gray area between, you know, sort of policy orientations.

The kind of revolutionary period in the third world were like, you know, the colored revolt, if you want to look at it like that, was underway full swing. You know, what the, what remained of the Western powers were still engaged, you know, Spain, Portugal, France, who just, you know, been issued crushing defeat at the Mben Fu. You know, they were trying to, they were trying to find a way to, you know, utilize firepower and the technological edge that they enjoyed. you know, in order to advantage them in counterinsurgency warfare. Vietnam ended in the 1970s as the era of true strategic parity and was emerging from the United States and the Soviet Union. And major powers were disengaging from the third world in direct capacities. Like, owing not just the fact that, you know,

interdependence was causing more and more conflict diets to emerge where escalation could have brought the superpowers into direct collision. like in 1973 in the Middle East, but also just because, you know, there's a certain weariness for, you know, this kind of constant engagement in active combat in multiple theaters. So Vietnam's important for all those kinds of reasons,

but also just, um, it, there's, because of all those things I just described and kind of the, you know, the historical situatedness of the conflict conflict in like temporally I mean there was a lot of data to be derived from it about about warfare you know what the road in terms of combat and things and technology and how these things impact the modern battlefield but also you can extrapolate things about the American system air grid operator of Ireland's electricity grid is powering up the northwest we're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area and your input and local

are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say, online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i.4 slash northwest. Inflation pushes up building costs, so it's important to review your home insurance cover to make sure you have the right cover for your needs. Underinsurance happens. Under-insurance happens. where there's a difference between the value of your cover and the cost of repairing damage or replacing contents. It's a risk you can avoid.

Review your home insurance policy regularly. For more, visit understandinginsurance.i. forward slash under insurance, brought to you by Insurance Ireland. And how particularly wartime administrations, politics is very much insinuated into the decision-making process. I don't mean high politics, although that is the case too. I mean, these kind of like domestic intrigues spill over into the decision-making process as regards, you know, war and peace decisions. And that's really, very bad.

And obviously, this gained a lot of momentum, you know, during the kind of, you know, the rise of, you know, the modern or contemporary, not modern, contemporary, like news cycle, which really began in the 60s and 70s. reaching it's zenith, you know, in like 1990, 1990, 1991, where you had the true 20 news cycle and the Gulf War on TV. I mean, now, obviously, that's done. I mean, there's certain, like, media is ubiquitous. Like, in a way, never, they never meant before, but there's not this bully pulpit of, like, the news media.

You know, the terrestrial news media. That's what everybody watches, and that controls, you know, narratives and the parameters of discourse. Like, that's what I was talking about. But to dive into the topic, there's nobody who's more associated with Vietnam than Robert McNamara. Okay, and Errol Morris, who I've got great esteem for,

I mean, he's this weird nevish type, but he makes great films. You know, he did a documentary on Fred Leichter, you know, who authored the report. He did a documentary on Donald Rumsfeld. You know, in his, I mean, not to go too far afield from our topic, but Earl Morris really pioneered, the documentary style of filmmaking in a way that's become convention and um him letting his

subject and is you know obviously his primary uh his primary um efforts are are biographical of historical personages or of people he's just interested in like in the case of leitre but putting the camera on the subject and letting the subject just testify and morris asking his questions off camera or the you know the filmmaker or the interviewer asking it wasn't off camera like morris invented that style but he i highly recommend anybody um the fog of war i think it was released in 2003 that's a pretty good kind of capsule summary of macnacra's career from you know it's the testimony of macdemeanor himself but because it's only like a two and a half hour film obviously a lot of things are left out but it i i i highly recommend that to anybody wants to learn more about

So let's talk about the man himself. Robert S. Magna Mare. The S stands for Strange. His middle name was strange. Robert Strange McNamara. He was the longest serving Secretary of Defense to this day from 1961 to 68. Nowadays, even administrations that have a comparatively strong mandate, you know, they play musical chairs with their cabinet postings. But even in McNamara's epoch, it was unheard of for a secretary of defense to serve that long, okay? Like, why did he serve this long? Well, McNamara came from Humble Origins. He was born in San Francisco in 1916. His father was the sales manager of some kind of wholesale firm that literally made shoes and other things like this.

Okay, like shoes and booths for, you know, like nurses and factory workers. So I mean, like part of the upper kind of like the lower middle class, upper working class, he proved himself to be a prodigy of sorts with mathematics, what we consider to be logistics and data management. I mean, logistics is just in those days. We consider to be like data management today. He graduated in 1937 from Berkeley, went out of the Harvard Business School in graduate of 1939. Um, obviously right around this time, you know, the, uh, the new dealer's war was, was jumping off.

It was only about, you know, two years away. And when Magnair found himself in uniform, uh, he ended up in the Army Air Corps. And guys of his kind of caliber and intellect tended to be shuttled that way, um, for obvious reasons. And he, uh, he entered the Army as a captain in 43. He served under Curtis LeMay, who then was a colonel. When McNamara and LeMay, and it's interesting, and McNamara gets into this in the fog of war documentary, like, McNamara was probably the closest thing LeMay had, like, a friend.

But, like, McNamara was sitting, you know, and he's like, I felt like I didn't really know the man very well, you know, at all. And then it's like when LeMay died, apparently LeMay's widow kind of McNamara, and it's like, yeah, Curtis said, you know, he loved you. He said all these great things about you. And McNamara's like, really? Like, I hardly heard the guy say more than one word. But in any event, Matt DeMiris, as a young officer, kind of a defectal adjutant to LeMay.

He kind of demonstrated his chops for military logistics and just kind of, you know, applied analysis of, you know, the mission at hand. in terms of like getting results within the rationale of what the Army Air Corps is charged within the Pacific. LeMay and Magnamara, they came up with a way to assault the Japanese mainland from the Mariana Islands instead of having to jump the Himalayas, this has been, it's had been done. And this owed to things I don't quite understand, like, you know, fuel consumption versus load, you know, versus you know travel within or above or below the jet stream and all these kinds of things you know the the complex the complex calculus of the then nascent science of uh military aviation okay so the magdramar the guy really was a polymath okay i mean he um and he demonstrated that um

really by the time he's about 30 years old when when magd got discharged he ended up at the motor company in 1946 and the Ford Motor Company it seems strange these days because like a college reason really mean anything but in those days um when it was a rare credential and when unless you were one of these kind of rich boys went to Yale or something if you went to college on merit it's because you were a guy you really really knew his stuff um there was very there's there's a dearth of uh of managers and and executive officers at first Ford Motor Company were college educated. So guys like McNamara was in demand.

He got recruited there as a manager of planning and financial analysis. He advanced rapidly by 1960 when he was in his early, when he was in his late, yeah, it was in early 40. He's not been like 43, 44. He became the first president of Ford Motor Company from outside the Ford family, which was a huge deal. and this was November 9th, which is a date that I think we're all familiar with. And if you were not before, I hope that after watching the stuff that Pete,

and I do, you're familiar with it now. November 9, 1960 was when he became first president of Ford. This was one day after JFK was elected. And during his tenure at Ford, both as what we now consider a quant in a corporate accountant and during his brief tenure as president he's credited with basically like making Ford competitive in the post-war period

like after like the government pork like went away obviously and this in the 1950s and early 60s like a huge amount of American automakers like just ceased to exist okay I mean the all these kind of iconic brands some of them endured like AMC endured to like the 70s or 80s But like there's a huge number of of automotive brands that went under during the 1950s. It was I mean that one part one part market corrective one part it just you know Just the scaling back of of the subsidies they'd enjoy you know during the kind of sell days of the new deal for

For big manufacturing firms But in any event JFCK whatever we can say about them and I don't want to I I don't want to get into a discussion on the man's merit or character or that of his politics. One thing that's indisputable is that he, with the exception of the kind of naked nepotism in the case of his brother, but I consider that to be more of a matter of self-preservation, you know, with installing him as the attorney general. With the exception of that, Kennedy and or his advisors, they had a remarkable eye for Cabinet.

a talent. And Kennedy's first choice for Secretary of Defense was Robert A. Lovett, who'd been the Secretary of Defense under Truman, interestingly, from 51 to 53, height of the Korean War. So obviously Kennedy was looking at for a man who had served as a wartime Secretary of Defense, okay? Which indicates the kind of hard realism pre-Cuba that Kennedy's not conventionally credited with,

but that I think is clear if people know how to read between the lines. But the reason why he broke a lot of it first is because he didn't, he nobody thought that man to mirror would leave for a motor company. So it's like it wasn't even like within consideration. Not on the ground is there's mirror or anything. It's just that, you know, the guy was the air grid. Operator of Ireland's electricity grid is powering up the northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area and your input and local knowledge

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I don't think it accomplished much of anything other than putting some shine on the occupation regime, which needed to be rehabilitated in order to get the Bundes Republic to play ball the way the Truman and Eisenhower, and the Truman and later Eisenhower administrations needed it to. But that's another story. George Marshall had Trump had his clout in those days. And a lot of the fact, again, that he, you know, he'd, He cut his teeth as a wartime defense secretary, trouble with the fact that prior to that he'd served as marshals under secretary of defense,

and he was very much a protege of the guy. But a lot of it declined. He's like, you know, out of raw fatigue, I think. But also he said, you should approach McNamara up because I'll probably take it. And Kennedy went through Sergeant Shriver. and offered him the Secretary of Defense position or the Secretary of the Treasury. McNammer immediately accepted the appointment of Secretary of Defense.

Was Magmur and knowledgeable about defense matters? Well, I mean, compared to anybody since Cheney, let me qualify that. I mean, I don't people think not in karate that Cheney's a total piece of shit. when Cheney was Secretary of Defense under Bush 43, I think he very much had a sense of what needed to be done in the transition era from the, as the Cold War is literally ending, okay? And I only invoked him because regardless of the guy's character,

which I think we're going to agree is not something laudable and whatever other issues he has, he was a highly qualified Secretary of Defense. No, he did not come up through the military, but he was something of a polymath, and he understood military matters as regards policy or the rim meets the road in a really splendid way. Subsequently, I think the secondary defense these days is kind of, it's almost like, it's almost like Kremlinology. You've got to look through the kind of big, there's all these like syndicures that don't mean anything anymore, and people's titles don't actually indicate what their roles, in fact, are.

I think Robert Gates was the de facto, like, shadow foreign policy president. I also think that Secretary of Defense has become Secretary of State in a real way, which is very strange. But in the Kennedy era, these cabinet positions carried a lot more weight. And there was a lot more transparency in terms of the man who said, who held the office, was very much the decision maker, with some narrow exceptions. You know, there, it, um, when you have an executive who was as much of, who is as much of a hands-on sort of authoritarian as FDR.

Yeah, they're very much for some people who are ciphers and key roles because he simply didn't want them to do anything. But exempting that, you know, if you got appointed Secretary of Defense, you were a pretty heavy hitter. And Magnifer was known for the Secretary of Defense because until, you know, until Nuremberg was Secretary of War, was the cabinet posting, but that's, that's, uh, there's a lot

to unpack there, frankly, but that's, that's outside our scope. But in any event, McNair was kind of a perfect choice for this era, okay, because, uh, the technology and I mean, this was the dawn of the information age, okay? Like, computing as we know it was very much just

kind of beginning then. It had begun during the Second World War, but in an applied capacity, it was emergent. Uh, McNamara understood logistics better than anybody he understood a highly scaled systems and management of those systems

and how to identify variables and the bounded rationality of the system in question and what it was purposed for you can identify like what was most essential to production and that's an odd skill set that's kind of like

what management comes down to in the burn up sense of managerialism I mean when I say management I don't mean some dick who like manages a Home Depot. I don't mean like the way you eat like fat HR ladies talking about management.

I mean in terms of, you know, actual actually knowing how to knowing how to optimize the performance of both the human element and the autonomous element within some highly scaled structure. You know, with all kinds of variables,

some of which are more essential than others, you know, but the core ones that facilitate productivity, and the most concrete ways, you know, need be identified. Like, most people can't do that. And particularly, you know, McNamera's day, yeah, as I just indicated, you know,

this was like the dawn on the information age. And, you know, technology, there's going to punctuate an equilibrium of technology. And I think we're going to all agree on that. You know, like, once there's, there'll be one innovation, and then, you know, that, that, that leads to others, you know in a very kind of um in a very kind of in a very kind of rapid capacity this was under this what was underway but you didn't have at your disposal like all this kind of you know you didn't you didn't

have consumer tech um that we take for granted in big business in those days you know like you didn't you you were basically like using like a pen and paper an abacist like proverbially and sometimes literally you know to handle like massive reams of data so uh the kind of like the right man in the role and they were almost always men um not for conspiratorial reasons but for anthropological ones um you know that it was this this was more essential then than even today although it's still like remains essential but um magnanimous philosophy in his own words was uh he said the senator defense in the then current era had to take an act of active role he said he aimed to provide aggressive leadership questioning suggesting alternatives proposing

objectives and stimulating progress just as he had done at Ford Motor Company that might sound corny on its face or like corporate PR like Vector is the kind of company man but in his case I think he really believed that and honestly I think in a lot of respects that's like what he accomplished he rejected radical organizational changes like I just indicated there was a lot of people both within the military establishment

and also within the policy establishment and this was very insestuous in some cases too but on Capitol Hill there's all kinds of people who are trying to force you know these kind of top-down changes to the military apparatus. You know the command structure

you know the way forces in being organized you know at that division level and you know uh and and what weapon systems were going to get privileged over others um there even there was really is that there was uh there was um there was debate about the draft and its future okay uh this uh there was a committee i cannot remember the name of it i'm sorry uh headed by senator uh steward sidingington um he wanted to his committee with him leading the charge they wanted to abolish the

the discrete military departments they wanted to replace the joint chiefs with a single chief of staff and you know not and and give him dominion over they wanted like an inter-service command structure okay you'd abolish discrete ranks

between the services you'd have like this unitary command structure that went to this one man who interned with accountable only to the president and his national security captain which in my opinion is a terrible idea but like this was the kind of thing among other stuff that was being taken seriously then you know and macknamara as soon as he took office he's like no that shit's over with you know like shut the fuck up that's not happening you know we're not well we maybe we'll be you know we may be we'll be fighting world war at you know in you know in a secondary theater you know within months we're not we're not going to completely upset the we're not going to completely upset the wagon or the apple part, you know, and start playing games with, you know, with forced structural organization.

And that was, and that actually, that was, that was, that, that was huge, okay, because things would have, I, I, I, Sigminton's idea was particularly stupid, I think, but there was all kinds, there was all kinds of stuff being bandied about that would have really, that wouldn't really kind of upset the ability of, of, of, of, um, of the entire defense of, establishment to react. And really, from, from,

after the Cuba crisis, I mean, in 73 and then in 83, I mean, yeah, there was, there was the punctuated crises of a strategic nature

that were truly critical. But about every two years, like, in between, like, there was some kind of, like, what you can think of as,

like, brush fire, um, a crisis of a secondary, in a secondary theater, that nonetheless, you know, required an active response and this ultimately this is one of things that led to like the creation

a special operations command but that stuff's i just go too you know like a unitary command for special operations forces unfortunately a lot of disasters happen for that to become air grid operator of ireland's electricity grid is powering up the northwest we're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these closes on the 25th of November. Have your say online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i. 4th slash Northwest. Employers rewarding your staff? Why choose between a shop voucher or a spend anywhere card when with options card you can have both. With options card, your team gets the best of both worlds.

They can spend with Ireland's favorite retailers or choose a spend anywhere card. It's simple to buy and easy to manage. There are no hidden fees, it's easy to use, and totally flexible. They can even re-gift or donate to a good cause. Make your awards more rewarding. Visit optionscard.i today. Implemented, but that's kind of always the way it is.

Not just with the military. But what was Kennedy's policy vision? if you want to understand vietnam's escalation they don't just mean the punctuated escalation um that was yielded or exploited depending on your perspective uh by the gulf of tonkin resolution um vietnam uh the true engagement of vietnam went began of eisenhower okay um in a real capacity and when kennedy took the oath of office um there was there was special operations forces types on the ground who who were directly engaged with the communists okay so i mean it's this this idea that you know this idea that you know like i said before we went like oh kennedy was trying to disengage

from southeast asia but then you know johnson is this this bad guy you know just engaged us engaged the america engaged the country at war said he could you know make money by you know bell helicopter selling selling stuff to the pentagon or whatever the fuck alvers stone and howard's in claim that did not happen um Kennedy uh in his uh in his uh speech to congress on March 28th the uh the core emphasis of the speech was defense it was Cold War it was uh it was war in peace it was power politics stuff in part because you know Nixon was always not just got a on the campaign trail I mean Nixon was not just always trying to portray Kennedy as some as some punk rich kid who's wet by the years he was

he basically was always calling him a pussy, you know, and saying, like, he's soft on communism, you know, um, he's a rich kid, he doesn't, he does not have the presence, um, to command, nor does he have, like, the knowledge, you know,

um, which is ironic, because Kennedy was a lot of things, but he was like, he mentioned they stay in the Kennedys, he was a gangster's son and he was a war hero, and he served in the brown water hate, like the dude was kind of a bad, you know, like, he, like, yeah, he, like, yeah, he wasn't like a big pussy, whatever. I mean, yeah.

But the, um, but I mean, politics is politics and being what it is, that's, you know, and, I mean, it wasn't just Nixon, other people, too. They, you know, Kennedy, he had kind of like a boyish charm, like, or phony you might think that is. Like, he did not, you know, he didn't come off as, this, like, heavy personage. And especially succeeding Eisenhower, like, the Soviets were genuinely afraid of Eisenhower. Um, and, uh, I think for good reason. I'm not, I don't think guys in hours as a rare genius like some people do

and I think in some ways he was an ugly guy in terms of his character but he he was a ruthless SOB, you know, and he definitely had a kind of command presence. I mean, that goes without saying, but what Kennedy outlined

to the March 28th, 961 speech, what he outlined is he said, look, massive retaliation is a doctrine. He's like, that's over. Okay? So is the new look as it's been, you know, as it was

euphemistically assigned. You know, he's like, we're not going to rely on on first, splendid first strike capability nor we're just going to rely on the nuclear deterrent, you know, in lieu of conventional forces. Like, it's not realistic. It's totally

inflexible and frankly, it's and frankly, it's totally it's morally bankrupt. You know, you don't you don't keep the peace by threatening the several states of the world with like

massive, like, genocidal countervalley with salt. You know, like, as a standing policy. But it, I mean, it being somewhat facetious, but there really was, like, they're, they got in the middle of that Herman Kahn came out of, and I think Herman Kahn was great,

and I'm not putting shade on them at all. But, Other than the middle of Khan and Van Neumann, like there were guys, like genuinely autistic guys, who'd, you know, come up through academia and game theory and stuff who were suggesting things that, you know, made sense in terms of, you know, the raw variables of balance of forces and capabilities, but we're just like,

completely, we're just like grossly moral offensive, morally offensive in terms of like uh in terms of policy orientation but i mean like dr strange love like yeah it's like it seems like over the top ridiculous like something that piece like movie but it was like ringing on like a real phenomenon you know like uh which is which is kind of funny but also kind of fucked up but uh the um he uh Kennedy also to his credit and this wasn't realized until Carter and a presidential director 58 and 59 and obviously the technology of that point it made it far more critical for human decision makers to assert control over a nuclear arms and command of control but things were already moving in that direction whereby not only were

uh were we're human decision makers being sidelined but the the military and specifically strategic air command um was very much taking control of these parts processes and Kennedy, you know, said that Scott to stop, you know, and Magna Mera was exactly the man to kind of see to that, you know, in terms of structuring forces and protocol, strategic forces, I mean, to obviate the threat of a civilian control and the commander-in-chief role being appropriated by, by a military element. he made her i believe did more to obviate that than anybody and dill carter and as we get into the carter era we're going to talk about like all that cool stuff i mean like i think it's cool fascinated by the late cold war and the kind of strategic nuclear paradigm and and artificial intelligence they're in i some people probably think that's boring as fuck but i think it's really cool.

But in any event, what's key about Kennedy's policy speech on defense was he said, quote, we need to operate with an eye to, quote, prevent the steady erosion of the free world through limited wars. Now, this is the crux of why America went to war in Vietnam. Okay. The way you got to look at the Cold War is that obviously there's the ongoing strategic nuclear threat of, you know, a total war between Warsaw Pact and NATO, which would be catastrophic. I mean, that goes not saying. But the real issue, as a basic stability ensued between the superpowers, it could be imagined and the Team B, you know, the, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the.

the team B exercise and the men who, the men who organized and facilitated it, and who were instrumentally getting Reagan elected, frankly. The scenario these guys painted was like, look, imagine in America where essentially all of Asia, save South Korea and Japan, all of Latin America, save Mexico, all of Africa, save like a handful of the Arab states

who are nonetheless like Soviet-aligned, goes communist or becomes basically sympathetic to the communist perspective and is either staked out a position of absolute neutrality in the Cold War or is availed itself as a Soviet proxy. Like, yeah, America would survive in those circumstances, but it basically would be this garrison state that was kind of a second-rate power within the Western Hemisphere, you know, surrounded by a hostile one. Like, that's a very dangerous world.

living and a lot of the things we even if even if some kind of perennial peace could be achieved a lot of the things we take for granted just would not exist you know uh that would have kind of frozen american tech and american wealth um at a certain point because just by virtue of dominating the rest of the planet you know like the soviet union could have kind of like remade the world in its own image kind of like how america like remade the world in its own image after 1989 which is not a good thing but my point being like people who act like the cold war um was this kind of like ridiculous paranoid fantasy or that it was like this excuse to like sell munitions and helicopters you know by defense contractors like it was in fact a real thing and this was the this was the

potential outcome really until until gorbachev and until uh the so he's folded their flag It wasn't this binary thing, like either, you know, total war or peace or, you know, oh, communism, quote, doesn't work. Yeah, it doesn't work, but that doesn't matter. All kinds of shit doesn't work that, you know, nevertheless, like, indoors or shuffles on, like, like, some, like, some fucking Frankenstein's monster or something. Like, that, that was a very real possibility. And Kennedy's, what he was saying here is, look, if we ignore, if we ignore theaters,

like, you know, China. If we ignore theaters, it's up there in Africa, if we ignore especially, you know, development in their own backyard. I mean, that's twofolds on the road doctrine, but that aside for a minute, you know, it's like, we're going to die like a death by a thousand cuts as regards our ability to, you know, influence the course of politics and the rest of this planet. You know, and do you really want to be like a Garrison state, albeit a continent-sized garrison state as large as self-sufficient, but you really, do you really want to be like the American island

in like the red world. I mean, that was, that was not only poignant, but it was very realistic. And I took Kennedy lot of props for that, for that speech. Like I said, I'm reading Wind the lines as he intended. Congress to read Wind the lines. Air Grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the Northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area, and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes. on the 25th of November. Have your say, online or in person.

So together, we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i. 4.Nor slash Northwest. Employers, rewarding your staff? Why choose between a shop voucher or a spend anywhere card, when with Options Card, you can have both. With Options Card, your team gets the best of both worlds. They can spend with Ireland's favourite retailers, or choose a spend anywhere card.

It's simple to buy and easy to manage. There are no hidden fees, it's easy to use, and totally flexible. They can even re-gift or donate to a good cause. Make your awards more rewarding. Visit optionscard.i today. But that's, I'm not a Kennedy fan or apologists at all,

but not only is that, to, go ahead, I'm sorry. Let me ask. Okay. You said that the Cold War was a very real thing. Is that because of, was it a continuing ideological war between the neoconservatives and who started them and the Soviet Union that whole time? Well, there's wars within, there's wars within that camp. I mean, if you want to know what I think, I agree with the Yaqui's perspective that the doctor's plot.

to like that epoch, not that incident itself, but that incident was demonement of a break within the communist camp, like a leadership cast, okay? And that's also one of the reasons why Israel often just became like massively anti-communist, like, all of a sudden, okay? So yeah, there was that. The Soviet Union

became this kind of strange thing. Like, yeah, it was a it clung to revolutionary socialism until the end of its life, but like, was it a merciless-Leninist state? Like, as much as such things existed, it was. But, you know, what the Soviet Union really had going for it was the kind of Soviet DDR model. That was really appealing to people in the third world.

You know, like Oliver North, when he was undercover, like, doing very shady things. When he landed at Managua Airport, he were laid back under, like, State Department cover if you liked their teleks or whatever. He's like at Managua Airport. It's a mirror, he's like, it's a mirror image of a checkpoint Charlie in the inter-German border. You know, he's like, there's a bunch of Nicaragua was running around acting like through the Stasi. You know, he's like, this is, and I mean, that spoke for itself. So even when, even when Stalinism, even when the, even when the worst up had, kind of like, even after 68, and, I mean, even before, like, putting 60s got on the formal breach, you know, with the new left. even when like nobody in France, nobody in the Netherlands, like even commies, I mean, like, looked like the Soviet Union for inspiration.

Like, you better believe that like hundreds and millions of people in Africa and Latin America, you know, in Indonesia, like they did. You know, like that's, they looked at that as like, wow, this is a great model for progress. And, you know, where we don't need to suffer, you know, the, we don't need to suffer the pain of exploitation to reach, you know, the bounty of technology of technology. and plenty and modern productive, productive techniques. You know, all we have to do is like sign on with the Soviet bloc and we'll get all those things. And plus, like, you know, they're going to

lead us, they're going to lead us to this Tlericotopia because eventually we're going to fight America. I mean, like, that's and yeah, within that, like the godfathers of neo-conservatism, like, they became, like, on that target list, ironically. Like, that's why, like,

communism, like a Frankenstein monster. Like, a lot of people who are, like, called which is a meaning was terrible. A lot of people are called like anti-Semitic. People are like, oh, how can you say that, you know, communism was, you know, emerged from the Jewish world of social existence. The Soviet Union hated Jews.

It's like, well, there's such a thing is, like, you know, there's such a thing as, you know, a gull and a frog, okay, like, you create something and it gets out of control or it turns on you. But it's also, too, like, ideologies aren't

any, like, one thing. It's like, you can't say like communism was Jewish or just not Jewish or that you know the coalition that created it in Russia you know consisted of like XYZ kind of people and nobody else the Soviet was a weird coalition of

like indigenous Slavs you know who hated the European overcast you know they were aligned with a slightly more cosmopolitan element you know of a Ashkenazi Jews who hated that same

overcast for different reasons and these people didn't really like each other but they had common enemies and common interests and when that fell apart in large measure because the situation of the Jewish people are nationally totally changed after Nuremberg and after the Elford Declaration yeah they they stopped keeping up appearances at all and yeah I agree with Yaki basically that if you were on the right after after about 953, 54, 55. They were running around like a John Birch or like calling for the death of Ivan.

You were a fucking idiot. I mean, basically, because it, um, Russians definitely, like, the Soviet Union definitely wasn't it. And Russia, honestly, is not really your friend if you're a white, western man, but they're not really your enemy either.

I mean, and it's, they is a hedge against people who really are your enemy. It's better that they exist and they not exist. But that's probably a subject for a different episode. But, yeah, the Cold War, the way to understand it in very raw terms, especially in the Kennedy era, before things got a little bit more complicated through the time.

And then, like when the Cold War jumped off again in earnest in 1979, 80, but it's not reductions to say that there really was a, quote, colored revolt underway. This was the question of the day in power political. and military terms. It was very much led from Moscow. It was facilitated by Warsaw Pact, arms, logistics, equipment, food stuff,

technology, manpower, everything. And that's what was on the table. Yeah, there was other, like, deeper nuances to, like, the ideology that had created it. But, and, um, as the world that stood when Kennedy took the old,

of office, like the Cold War was what I just described, and that was a really real thing. Like I said, yeah, guys like like Yaki, guys like Otto Riemer, Yaki was dead by then, but what he'd been saying before, and what Riemer was saying, until the day he died, was, you know,

if you're a European, you know, who's under occupation, which they all were, I mean, it's still in this day. In those days, you know, the Red Army was also in Berlin. But, you know, I said, you need to be very careful about what you wish for, and in advocating that, you know,

the Soviet Union should be destroyed because it's really the only hedge against the traditional enemy of Europe. And I agree with that. But for our purposes, I have besides the world situation, as it wasn't connected up the oath of office, because I gave up this idea like, oh, you know, what a bunch of horseshit.

We got to go fight the communists and now where they'll be over here. Like, that was not what was on the table. That's not what anybody thought. And the quote, domino theory, wasn't this crazy thing that John Bercher's thought or that crazy generals thought. Like this was actually happening.

Like huge swaths of the planet were going red. Okay? Stalinism had real cachet and, you know, a huge, among huge percentage of the global population. And the entire like Razone Detra supposedly of Nuremberg was we're going to create

this world society. I know we even have a United Nations. So, okay, well, if like, you know, at that time, I think there's about, like, I think there's about like five billion people in the world. It's like, well, if like four billion of those five billion people, like, think that communism's great, you've got a problem. Okay, I mean, that's what the Cold War was about. It wasn't about, you know, when I walk outside and Terry Honey, Indiana,

you know, there's going to be some, there's going to be some Chinaman with a red star in his head and a bayonet, you know, who's going to, like, fucking, you know, charge me and, like, you know, turn me into fucking sashie. me and like enslaved my wife and you know maybe everybody's go to the drive in and watch like shitty communist movies nobody likes like that's not what people thought maybe some people thought that but that's not you know like that that's not what underlay the cold war and like people like maddenor um well let me let me ask you another question it almost it almost makes it sound like

you could like somebody would say that they're reactionaries you know how you know people on the right or always just we're all reactionaries. It makes it sound like if the, if the third world is turning red and these dominoes are falling, there's a reason why they're doing it and they're reacting to what they're seeing happening to Europe, basically. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

And it seems like that's the case too. And that's why, I mean, today, there's something interesting. I spent a lot of time, I spent a lot of time reading about and kind of studying as much as I can what what, um, what, what, what,

what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what,

the people for the liberation of Palestine, general command, like who, who were big time alive with

Warsaw Pact, like, they flipped Islamic, like, very profoundly, okay, and like,

very immediately, like, after the wall came down. And, like, some people be like, oh, you know,

those, those guys are just being mercenary and, and doing what they have to do to keep, you know, money and weapons flowing. I don't think it's that simple,

man. I think to your point, a lot of these guys, they were basically, they basically had contempt for, like, the features of capitalist modernity that they consider to be, like, most offensive, you know, whether it was like sexual ostentiousness or, you know, like, the erosion of, uh, of meaningful roles for men and women, or, you know, like mixing between races or, you know, pornography. Um, and I, there, there is a certain puritanical aspect of communism is a man, infested in the third world, but even otherwise. You know, like that was one of the things. Airgrid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the Northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November.

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flexible. They can even re-gift or donate to a good cause. Make your awards more rewarding. Visit Optionscar.com. Today. That was a constant refrain. I mean, there was like, I'll get to fuck the advice and stuff in the DDR. You know, like, I mean, there was like, not like narcotics, but like prostitution and sex stuff and all kinds of really crummy social ills.

But at least the official line was that this stuff's nasty. It's, it's deplorable. This is the kind of thing characteristic of the capitalist. like we don't have any truck with that and this kind of thing should be identified and stopped out wherever we find it. So yeah, I think there's an aspect to that. And yeah, but that was, that was Yagi's all point

and some of the people he inspired subsequent like H. Keith Thompson and like James Maddo. A lot of people think it was a crank. I actually hold them in a lot of steam. That was the whole point. The old point was that Washington and New York or in Los Angeles or how a lot more, you know,

quote unquote, red in Moscow and East Berlin ever were or ever will be. So, yeah, there's an aspect to that. It's a kind of a good question. And it's like a question, is it quite, it's like a theoretical philosophical aspect to it like we just raised,

but there's also like a practical aspect in concrete terms and the way people who are like leading their lives, you know, like you raised too. That's why I raised the issue of these Middle Eastern peoples and stuff. Because I also think they're kind of like a bellwether sort of radical tendencies,

but that, I mean, that's, that's my, I've got my own thoughts on that, and that's, that is, like, way too far aside the scope. But, yeah, I'll, uh, I'll, uh, I'll, uh, I'll try, I'll try and get to the point and, like, wrap us up to realize, I've been rambling for a minute, but the, uh, I, I can ask questions that get people doing that.

What's it? No, no, I, uh, I, I, I appreciate you asking questions, man. Like, I appreciate that, like, the give and take. I mean, you, I mean, you always, you always, you always didn't see you, weight like meaningful stuff that I've a lot of time I haven't thought about but also it just it helps me because I I worry sometimes that like I go out too many tangents because my brain sort of works that way but yeah I wait interject whenever you want um and don't I'm not going to feel like slated or something but the uh the um the uh yeah Kennedy's basically I mean would

basically underlay all this too in a in again kind of like raw strategic terms too like without i mean aside from the politics um kennedy realized that you you need a lot of you for lack of i forgive me if this sounds like flippant or silly but you need like a number of menu options in military affairs in terms of your response okay it can't just be either like massive assault massive countervue assault massive countervalue with salt or some kind of like inglorious retreat or doing nothing you know i mean that's uh it's like highline said to starship troopers like this uh which is like a thinly availed metaphor a thingly veil critique of uh of uh like izenauer truman and hour era military thinking like some young officer candidate says like this grizzled like

infantry captain like what the hell what the hell do we need conventional inventory for and the captain's like let me ask you something like if a child's miss. Do you cut his head off or you spank him? You know, like you, you don't just like maintain a hatchet to like be head and a misbehaving child. You know, that's, which seems like macabre kind of silly, but it's actually poignant. And, yeah, that's something we take for granted as the way things developed, particularly through the Reagan era. And in terms of military affairs, I mean. But in the 1950s, really through like 50s.

5960 people were literally talking that way like hey we've got nuclear arms we can threaten anybody with you know basically like countervalued genocide like why why do we need why do we need to best around with conventional forces you know and that's that seems crazy but that but it wasn't just I'm not to talking about like I'm not to talk about like goofballs like in the media or something like the equivalent of like internet guys the day like I mean like actual guys with clouded policymaking circles, you know, and guys who had a chest full of ribbons and a hat full of brass, like, you know, fucking talking this way, man. But it's, um, McNamara, um, and that's why we'll get into this, I guess we, as we proceed

in our series, but the roots of the Revolution and Military Affairs, uh, are here with McNamara, and McNamara, one of the things he diligently worked. towards me the Vietnam War ended up like a huge amount of his time and labors but obviously but developing a conventional capability um not just for the purpose of flexible response but to really make like a devastating conventional capability the kind of sphere point of American power Air Grid operator of Ireland's electricity grid is powering up the northwest we're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November.

Have your say, online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i.4.n. Northwest. 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. and Christmas setting at the Guinness Storehouse. Enjoy seven floors of interactive exhibitions and finish your visit with breathtaking 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.org.com. That very much came from Magna Mera and he realized the way the world was going and part of it was he realized what we just talked about that, you know, nuclear arms are

purposed for a very, very specific exigency that almost never, ever, ever occurs. But also just, you know, the dawn of the information age, the, you know, the kind of rapid, punctuated development of all these applied technologies, you know, like things were becoming possible in the battlefield that were unthinkable even, you know, 20 years ago, you know, in the then present. It's, um,

the, uh, and McNamara, McNerra's fortune is really, during the Kennedy administration, um, I mean, if you need any more evidence that Kennedy really did, it kind of marry the U.S. the Republic of Vietnam

in terms of, um, you know, uh, global security policy. It was a, it was McNamara who put together really the first military advisory group that landed in Vietnam, like in real depth. I mean, yeah, going back to Eisenhower, there'd been, you know, advisors on the ground.

Boy, became military assistance command of Vietnam, you know, MacB. It was during, it was during, it was during, when Kennedy was still alive, it was during the last, you know, like year and a half of his life or whatever. the McNamara raised force levels to about from a few hundred to about to about 17,000 okay um and I mean this was well before the Gulf of Tonkin incident okay in August 964 after Mr. Kennedy was dead of course but the uh the um and the golf at Tonkin is a tricky issue too like I I don't know how to approach that because it warrants more attention than I'm giving it right now but

people talk about it like I know that I'm gonna get like hate messages for this because I do anyway from libertarians but libertarians have this idea about the about um about article one and article two like expressly delegated powers they do these things like they do the gold standard like something like they're sacrosanct and never ever change or something but formal declarations of war between powers that enjoy equalities of status in a multi-polar world where the entire planets like divided up, you know, between these aforementioned powers and where like a change in the status of relations comes from like

a formal declaration of war and this is a recognized policy instrument that doesn't happen anymore. Maybe that's bad. Maybe it's not, but it doesn't happen anymore. And since Nuremberg, it's not thinkable for that to happen anymore. So for guys that come out and be like, well, actually, it requires a declaration of war. Like, no, that's not how things work. Okay.

And I'm not going to like bore everybody with the next position for next hour. I'm like why it doesn't work that way, but it doesn't. And you've got to take my word for that. Okay. And Article 2, an expressly delegated power that is not negotiable and does not change with the times, is the president being the commander in chief, okay? And the president's ability to command forces is not contingent upon a 19th century-style declaration of war. Okay.

However, considering Congress controls the purse strings, it's a good idea to make your case for why you should get, you know, endless money and cargo to wage the war. That's what the Gulf of Tonkin was about. Okay. Was it a ruse? Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn't.

It doesn't matter. Johnson was going to get his war somehow, or his mandate somehow wasn't Johnson's war. Congress had to find a way to give him the, give him the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, signal the Pentagon that they were willing to, they were willing to, they were willing to flip the bill.

And this is the way it came together, you know, basically to protect the record. You know, because America, I mean, here's the fiction of, oh, we're always fighting defensive wars. Hey, we were attacked. And finally, like we talked about in the last episode, there was a lot of fictions that went into the drawing of the map

in Indochina after 1955. And whether northern South Vietnam are truly sovereign states, that was not even really clear. because the 70th parallel was supposed to be a stop-gap measure pending, you know, pending countrywide elections whereby there would be a single seat of government. And that didn't happen. And the DM government claimed initially that that was because the NLF, you know,

the Viet Cong, you know, had resorted to violence in order to sway, in order to sway, you know, opinion in their favor of terror. So these elections are definitely postponed. So, I mean, it's not as simple as, well, you know, the Republic of Vietnam is a sovereign country and it's under assault, and we have an obligation to them moral as well as juristic. But what I'm getting it is that it's not so simple to say like the Gulf of Tonkin incident

or the alleged incident and the resolution was like some ruse by evil Mr. LBJ to, you know, get a war mandate pursuant to a lie. and oh by the way that's illegitimate anyway because there's no declaration of war like it's 1840 like not that's not the way to approach it and like I said I know people are going to send me like fuck you messages I don't care as I'm right and you're wrong

but um that's important and I'm the last person who's going to defend LBJ in the record but whether it been Kennedy whether it had been Ike whether it had been Mr. Nixon they probably would have finest it a little better than LBJ did but they would have gotten their war

mandate in some similar way okay it they just would have okay that's that's not arguable um

obviously after the Gulf Tonkin resolution was um was rushed through um uh basically the escalation over

Vietnam like quite literally began like with the air war um initially was massive retaliatory airstrikes against naval targets and targets within North Vietnam proper that were said to be facilitating its blue water navy capability

which supposedly is what it brought American vessels under assault but from there I mean the kind of fix was in and people can I mean the fix was in is where I'm going to characterize rising. Like I said, I believe, within the bound of rationality of the Cold War, the Vietnam War had to be fought. Okay. And I stand by that position. But Magnamara, even had that not been the case.

You know, man, if there's a security defense, you know, like any cabinet officer, I mean, you're, you're accountable to the commander of chief. Okay. I mean, it's not, it's not like Magna Mera had, you know, first of all, you can't, you can't be some conscientious objector and fulfill your obligations. of the office of Secretary of Defense, but whatever McNamara did or didn't do, I mean, he was executing the orders of the commander in chief and policy does not originate with the Secretary of Defense's office, or at the Department of the Army, or at the Pentagon, frankly. However, as we get into McNamara's successor, his true successor, Melvin Laird, I think the career of Laird and kind of the trajectory of his tenure and his machinations to get against Nixon and Kissinger.

I think that was kind of the origin of the true modern deep state, as we think of it. There's always been shadow government. Shadow government's not the deep state. That's something that was emergent, in my opinion, really interenced around the 1970s. But in any event, Magmira anyway, he, you know,

Magmira visited Vietnam repeatedly, like, in person. You know, I mean, and not just diplomatic meeting greets, you know, or he'd visit, you know, DM or two and go to some embassy party and then, you know, take some, like, handshake shots of some general. I mean, he visited McVee. He spent time at Longbin asking junior officers, like, what's going on here, is that. You know, you spent time pouring over, you know, embodied count statistics. they were coming from battalional

headquarters in the field like Doc Toe or whatever and saying like this isn't right this is not possible so this idea that he was just like this kind of ghoulish warmonger

just like signing off and everything or you know somehow enriching himself I mean Magna Mugna we don't even sit here and like feel sad for Magna Magnamara he ended up at the World Bank subsequently he lived a very good life but the fact is in public life he was ruined you know it's like what

what great stuff did Magdara get from, you know, this kind of 70 years of managing the Vietnam War. Like, it's not it's not like he got like some great benefits from this. You know, it's not like he pulled up Zelensky and like was pocketing a billion dollars in when he would have been at nobody before. Like, this was

like a huge step down. You know, like Magnumvir didn't get anything by waging the Vietnam War on behalf of Johnson. Like he really didn't. But, um, we're coming up in the hour here. Let's, I'm going to get into Melbourne Laird and the rest of McNamara next episode,

and we can do that whatever you want, like even this week. And I'll, I realize it's kind of got to cut to the chase. It's just somebody is a person that's kind of towering as a magnanimary. It warrants a lot of attention, like more so than some. Air Grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the Northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area,

and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say, online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i.4.4. Northwest. 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 breathtaking 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. And some people and even some presidents, but yeah, so I hope I didn't I hope I didn't drag it out too long for your...

No. Okay, great, yeah, yeah. I figured you would have like kind of rained me in. if I was like too far on tangents. But yeah, no, thank you, Pete. This was really great. Yeah, I mean, the only reason I interrupted was I had questions. So. Oh, no, no.

I want to take up that question proper, too. Like, in a dedicated episode, maybe it's like the bookend when he finished the Cold War. That's like a hugely important question. And to me, especially, like, I spent a lot of time with it, you know, just only to my own kind of interest in things. So, yeah, no, I interject whatever you want, man. Like, please do.

Like, it helps me organize my thoughts. All right. Do quick plugs and we'll get out. Yeah, man. As people might have noticed because I tweeted it out as well as I announced it on my substact chat. Like Steelstorm 2, you know, my second science fiction novel.

It's been printed. It's in the hands of Imperium Press. I've got to touch base on my dear friends there anyway, but they physically haven't. So I'm going to get word from them when it's going to go up for sale on Imperiumpress.org. and I'll drop word of that. In the meantime, you can find me,

you can find my podcast and some of my long forum at Substack. It's Real Thomas 777.com. You can find me on Twitter at Triskelian Jihad. The T is a number of seven, but if you seek me on Twitter, you probably shall find, or just like search Thomas 7777. That's basically where I'm active right now.

I am watching the YouTube channel by the end of the month. promise. I know it's been delayed and delayed, but by the last day in January, I mean, before then, but by the end of January, like, the channel will launch. So please look for that, too. It's Thomas TV on YouTube. I appreciate it. Until the next time. Yeah, like that. Thank you very much. Thanks, man. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Kenyana show for part seven. Is this eight or seven? Eight of the Cold War series. Thomas 777. How you doing, sir?

I'm very well, man. Thanks for hosting me, as always. Don't feel bad. I only know that it's part Ocho because that was indicated when I joined the meeting. That is Cold War with Thomas Part 8. You know, like Jason takes Manhattan, but it's just like Thomas talks on Zoom. But as it may, we're going to continue to flesh out, you know, the career of Robert McNamara and the Vietnam conflict. not just because McNamara is a key personage, you know, in understanding the Cold War.

I mean, he represented a certain type, truly. You know, people derisively would refer to people like McNamara and Thomas Schelling, who we'll talk about probably the episode after next. He was another brilliant shelling. I mean, he was another brilliant polymath. He was instrumental in Cold War strategic planning and, you know, gaming scenarios that, that were wherein, you know, a

strategy could meaningfully be incorporated into extant technology and weapons platforms. And the degree to which this shaped policy at every level, like, cannot be overstated. I mean, I guess on the one hand, that's obvious because we're talking about, you know, I mean, I mean, the essence

of the political is war and peace. You know, kind of the zenith of war fighting technology is a general nuclear war, even if you know, we stipulate that a lot of the kind of hysteria around nuclear weapons is just that hysteria. But, you know, the shelling was far less of a public figure than McNamara, I mean, for a few reasons. Not that I think are obvious. You know, shelling didn't preside over an active war wherein, you know, Americans were dying in theater.

but McNamara kind of became that a figure that the left kind of loved to burn an effigy you know, proverbially speaking and I think he I think he kind of like embodies that era like the era of the technocrat and I don't mean that in punitive terms

I mean certainly that there's a lot of men who that that kind of that kind of sociological structure produced that that were not attractive people and that were lacking in a grounded morality and we're not, you know, we're not the kind of men who one would want sort of guiding policy in concrete ways. But, you know, McNamara himself was a complex person.

And I make the point again and again, like, McNamara was not this guy who aspired to be Secretary of Defense. He wasn't like one of these kinds of, he wasn't one of these guys who really had no way of kind of, like, capturing clout other than going to Washington. and capitalizing on connections. You know, they asked him. He didn't ask them. And like we talked about, it's not like McNamara resigned in disgrace or something. You know, I mean, he went on to be the chairman of the World Bank.

But at the same time, you know, his name became synonymous with the kind of gruesome calculus of the body count, you know, with, you know, the kind of, the kind of head. narrative of people that came to surround the pen papers you know so it's not like it's not like merrimar somehow like profited immensely from his tenure as secretary of defense and um you know his he even when even public opinion precipitously turned against the war um post tett uh you know it's uh magnanimara didn't simply exit stage left when things went bad and i i can't i can't emphasize enough to you know the fact that he served for seven years that's an eternity for a cabinet post particularly for secretary defense and particularly during um uh a wartime administration you know so like i said

i i'm sure a lot of people are going to just claim that i'm some kind of macamara apologist owing to you know owing to um you know either like emotional uh factors or you know some kind of hero worship like neither of those things are true um but i at all. Anyone who hasn't seen it, like I said, I highly recommend he watch the Aero Morris biopic on McNamara, where I mean, he

interviews the man himself, you know, because that's what Matt, what Morris does. I reserve judgment until one views that. Magnumara quoted himself incredibly well. And to compare that to one of Morris's subsequent biopics, about Donald Rumsfeld, who came off just as really kind of, I mean, just really, just a really, really just nasty person. You know, I mean, in every sense of the word. You know, I think, I think compared to, I think compared to those who followed who were either clowns or just, you know, kind of, you know, cynical creeps like Rumsfeld. And I think, I think McNamara looms very large. And, in mostly positive terms. But we've left off last episode, I believe, talking a bit about the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and the incident itself.

I don't want to, I don't want to rehash the entire debate, as it were, that still surrounds the incident that gave rise to the congressional revolution that, you know, gave Johnson the tabular Ross to escalate, essentially. I just made the point then, as I'll reiterate now, that for better or worse, and I understand the libertarian argument against this precedent, and I very much understand the kind of constitutionalist objection to it, but for better or worse, this is how the business of war and peace is conducted, and this is how it's finessed in policy terms. Okay. Some kind of incidents is identified as a clear and present danger or constituting

necessity, you know, demanding intervention. You know, Congress affords the executive the ways and means in budgetary terms and in command terms to accomplish, you know, the mission in general terms. And then, you know, it's the legislature bows out of the decision-making process. in large part in a formal capacity you know until until something happens

or a series of occurrences ensue that you know brings it back within their direct purview you know either willing to revolt of the body politic as it were or you know some kind of perceived malfeasance on the part of the executive in terms of the

conical of the war, but we're not here to have a discussion on abstract constitutional theory, you know, we're on, you know, warpower and what it, and what, and what its significance is in the, in the post-Norber era. I just wanted to make the point that the Westphalian practice of literally declaring war, um, as a change of status and relations between equals, like that, that's totally obsolete. And it doesn't matter if we think that's good or bad. That's the way it is. So the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. and doesn't stand out as this uniquely, you know, kind of corrupt way of a rather morally... Air Grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the Northwest.

We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area, and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say. online or in person. So together, we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.e. ford slash northwest. 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 breathtaking 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 ginniss storehouse.com. Get the facts. Be Drinkaware. Visit drinkaware.compromise executive, procure a war mandate. I'm not going to sit here and say Johnson had any redeeming characteristics, but even like if Kennedy had been in the White House, he would have pursued.

He would have proceeded in much the same way, as with Nixon, okay, as would, you know, Reagan had he been in the fight us. I mean, this is something important to keep in mind, but I won't believe that point anymore. But what the resolution represented was that, and I'm going to jump backwards a little bit as we proceed to talk about Colonel John Paul Van, who I think is very important. his analysis of the Vietnam War, like, as it was underway, I think is essential to understanding the battlefield situation and, you know, kind of the tactical shortcomings of, particularly of MacVee. But I don't want to get into that yet. But what's important to keep in mind in discussing the escalation that was facilitated by the Tonkin resolution is that Melancho, Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, it arrived in country in 1962. And from 62 to 65, there was a proper counterinsurgency campaign underway against the Viet Cong.

And this really, you know, Army Special Forces was very much purpose for that, you know. And that we talked earlier about, you know, Kennedy's, you know, Kennedy's, you know, Kennedy's, strategic orientation towards secondary theaters, you know, and the need to, you know, not surrender these contested territories to the communists, you know, for not just for, you know, on grounds of military necessity, but, you know, owing, owing the profound political implications, a communist victory, you know, in these, in these developing countries, you know, the, and the fact that he, he is another Kennedy was such a champion of special operations forces is an extremely bound up with that policy vision but um Vietnam pre-tonk gulp so Kennedy in 62 and 63 was commander-in-chief guiding these missions

yeah essentially and I mean he had it was it was McNamara and it was um you know he Kennedy had a lot of talent around him you know who were who were helping him identify kind of the concrete variables now that's translated to actual war fighting. But, I mean, obviously, it wasn't just emerging from the mind of Kennedy. But Kennedy did understand military matters reasonably well. You know, I mean, he had been in pretty heavy action in the Navy. You know, he wasn't just some, like, civilian neophyte who had no idea of, you know, what, what this constitute and what the difference was between the heavy army, you know, organized.

organized around armor, you know, and that had a very, very, very, clausole witsy in view of war fighting, you know, is the advance of fire. I mean, this really did, like, rule the day, you know, and, I mean, for good reason, frankly, because the Army's most probable military mission was to fight the Red Army. I mean, but the kind of tactical flexibility that early specializing operations forces represented. This really was like a revolutionary idea. You know, like people under like 45 or so, when they think of the army, or they, when they think of the military establishment, they think of special operations forces. That's completely the opposite of the way things were during

the Cold War. Okay. And it, and there's a lot of, there was a lot of institutional resentment of the army towards special operations. I mean, that's a whole other issue that's fascinating. But point being there's kind of this mischaracterization among court historians that okay in Vietnam there's this guerrilla war underway and you know Johnson you know being the you know being the kind of fool that he was and you know the army being you know trigger happy as they are they just like looked over the situation and said you know what we're going to employ in massive in massive depth and we're going to throw like as much firepower as we can at the vietnam like that's not what happened you know there's a years long counterinsurgency

low-intensity war against the National Liberation Front by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, by the Arvin Ranger element, which was kind of their quasi-special forces elements. And like we talked about, the Saudi enemy's army does get a bad rap because there were elements among them that fought hard and were very game fighters.

But yeah, there's actually a fascinating old movie called Go Tell the Spartans, which is about exactly this topic. It's about, you know, like the Kennedy era of Vietnam War and these green berets of this kind of forl or an outpost, you know,

as they realize the kind of tactical situation is changing. And obviously in the back of their mind, they're terrified, although they'd never, like, let on this is the case of, like, the North Vietnamese army one day showing up and just, like, sweeping through, you know, out of nowhere. And I mean, things like that did happen.

you know, later on, like against the, against the purported, you know, in, in contrast to what Army intelligence was claiming were the capabilities extant of, you know, had no way to deploy in the South. But as it may, as, as the, as things that are going bad in the South, and as DM made it clear that he was willing to negotiate, you know, we talked about the kind of murky political status of Vietnam, you know, and it, um, it, there was, there was a lot of, there was, there was, there was great concern that DM was just going to, you know, quote, would sell out the West and come to, you know, come to terms with, with Ho Chi men and with Hanoi, you know, incorporate, you know, not just the NLF, but, you know, the Communist Party

of Vietnam, uh, into, you know, into, uh, into, into a, in, into the ruling apparatus. And I mean, obviously that was unacceptable um because that you know that that the the precedent that that would set would be completely would be completely at odds with what you know america was trying to accomplish in the developing world and you know we talked about how again like you know the uh the it was it was at base we're talking about a political conflict it doesn't matter that you know um there they're there that that's indochina is not you know a bounty of natural resources it doesn't matter that you know there's not there's not some absolutely essential you know maritime port of call that you know has uh has profound military significance there um you know the line in the sand

was uh was vietnam and um that's that's where the communist challenged and that's you know the challenge that was going that challenge was going to be met or it was not and um the communists had great momentum in the third world even really up until up until the late 1980s you know like long after you know long after like Stalinist type rule you know and marxist leninist revolutionary ambition and then kind of like kind of the armed insurgency culture or a political culture around that long after that like lost its luster you know for anybody but you know total diehards you know like the kind of people who joined like the batter minehoff gang you know in the western world this kind of thing had an incredible power to animate people in the third world.

You know, and Hōchi Min himself was a testament to that. You know, like we talked about, Ho was not some, it wasn't some bumpkin or some, or some ignorant, you know, farmer or something. You know, he was, he was highly educated. You know, his family was, was wealthy and well situated and very insinuated into the indigenous political structure. you know in uh in vietnam so you know and he was not he was not an outlier nor was he anachronism but be as it may um it uh the the mass escalation i mean yeah part of that was owing to the fact that the uh the post uh new look army um you know once once conventional forces you know kind of became uh once once again

in vogue for like a better way to describe it um the army uh the army remained obsessed with with firepower you know and the idea that you know combined arms and a lot of these nascent technologies um you know and the precursor to smart weapons you know and uh as well as like the technologies immediately proceeding the revolution and military affairs that allowed command of control to truly direct fire um but like the the destructive capabilities of these things was just awesome so that There was, in fact, the sense in the Pentagon that, like, look, you know, asymmetric warfare, yeah, there's, you know, there's considerations emergent, you know, within that paradigm and that's got to be accounted for within the battle space itself. And within, you know, and it's got to inform decision making of how forces are structured and deployed in country. But at the same time, you know, if you can blast the hell out of everything, you're going to get a lot done, you know, and, and, and.

how can the national liberation front? Airgrid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say, online or in person. So together, we can create a more reliable,

sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at AirGry. on the many days of Christmas the Guinness Storehouse brings to thee a visit filled with festivity experience the 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 breathtaking 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 Guinness Storehouse.com Get the facts, be drinkaware, visit drinkaware.e. You know, it doesn't matter how hard they are. It doesn't matter, you know, what kind of,

what kind of civilian support they have. You know, it doesn't matter, you know, kind of how, it doesn't matter that they've got this kind of mass, youthful male population to draw upon. You know, if you, if you apply this kind of pressure in the form of, you know, just relentless and massive firepower against the adversary, he's going to just crumble. I mean, there was more than, you know, like a modicum of that sort of thinking.

I mean, obviously. However, it was clear, you know, in 1959 and 1966 all the way to, you know, 19704, 75, when the People's Army of Vietnam launched its final offensive, it was clear that Hanoi was not going to prevail without a massive conventional assault on the south. Vietnam's a comparatively huge country. The National Liberation Front had the capability to dominate the countryside very effectively. Thus, this is what was responsible for the kind of hearts and minds campaign, all of that. And the idea of free fire zones and strategic hamlets, and we'll get into some of that later.

but the but but but but but but the but but the but the but the not only could not capture but they couldn't

you know there was a dearth of a of a necessary civilian support you know which was the true kind of like infrastructure the vietcon you know like any guerrilla movement that's what they have to draw upon but even like their big coup was when they their big battle field coup was when the nlf captured huay city you know and that's you know and, and, uh, just,

those dramatic shots of the U.S. Marines, you know, like, raising the American flag, like over the Citadel in, uh, in, uh, in Hway, you know, um, I mean, because it was this horrible, like, pitched battle, but I mean, just really, really raw. That's why I think it's cool that full metal jacket, like, focuses on Hway, you know, um, and, and, uh, um,

Gustav Hasford made Hway the focus of, uh, of the battlefield, um, segment of, of his novel for, for a reason. But the point is, Like, you know, they couldn't hold it. You know, it's not like, it's not like the NLF took away and sent it to this massive push on Tet 68, you know, and then, and then the civilian population, he came out and drove, you know, allowed them to consolidate that their presence there, you know, quite the contrary. So it was clear that South Vietnam either was going to have to develop a competent conventional capability. ability butchressed by or facilitated by rather, you know, modern combined arms and hardware,

as well as the training of their people, you know, to operate these, these weapons systems and weapons platforms. Or there's going to have to be direct intervention, you know, by CETO, ideally. We got into CETO the other day. Or some constellation of, you know, America and allies in order to in order to stave off this this imminent assault until the South could stand on its own

and that's what I just said that's what became grand strategy in Vietnam you know and as any military man will tell you you know you don't you don't wait until the exigency is afoot

and then respond to it You know, just like, just as you anticipate capabilities, you know, not, you know, you don't just consider, you know, probable action in terms of, in terms of judging in, you know, a potential opposing force, you, you, you, you, you, you, you don't, you don't wait until the people's army of Vietnam is assaulting across the 17th parallel, you know, in. in depth, you know, with combined arms, you know, to decide, like, how are you going to react to that? Okay, so this was the, this was, this was the logic behind the massive escalation. And there had been at its peak pre-Tonken Gulf, I think, it was between 17,000 and 18,500, approximately American forces on the ground in Vietnam. This is by the end of 1967, this had swelled the 485,000 troops. And by the peak, which was the summer of 1968, it was over half a million. It was something like $530,000.

Okay. And obviously, you know, as the casualties mounted, and as, as some, the police situation, you know, kind of like restricted the, uh, the tactical environment and what was, and what was permissible according to the rules of engagement. Um, you know, commanders on the ground, uh, down to the company level, you know, their, their constant refrain was like, basically, we need more manpower. You know, we need, we, you know, we need to be able to, um, apply more, um, apply more pressure. Now, and why, why was it kind of boiled down to that metric? Okay, well, you know, we talked

when we first kind of scratch the service of the atomic age. I mean, like it's Advent and what the implications were in policy terms as well as military ones. And obviously I can speak a lot more about the former than the latter because I'm not a military man. And I, you know, that's not really my wheelhouse. But I do know something about policy as it interfaces with military decision making and the needs of, you know, the needs of the military establishment to accomplish stated policy goals as directed by the civilian executive there came the ability to the ability to corral data and the ability to interpret data the ability to apply data to all kinds of problems at scale you know whether you're talking

about you know what you're talking about the best way to offset liability if you're a you know if you're manufacturing automobiles you know and thus that was the you know unsafe at any speed that was like the ralph nader book about uh you know the auto industry and it's this macab calculus of you know how many how many desowing the products liability issues were acceptable um you know vis-a-vis what would be the cost of remedying these design defects i mean everybody's familiar with that okay um this this was something that was emergent just like across the board, you know, in the private sector and government, you know, in social planning. The military in the Cold War, it, what the victory metric was in these secondary theaters, you know,

where the primary challenge was a political one, you know, not a military one. A comparable situation would be what the British were facing in Northern Ireland. Okay. I mean, that conflict developed differently, but identifying, you know, not just what the tactical orientation should be in order to neutralize the opposing force, but what the performance metric is, you know, of those forces in theater. well what this came boiled down to was you know the the ability to manufacture enemy dead quite literally

the logic of the body count became the performance metric so there'd be demands from a battalion level you know originating with uh originating you know at um at longbin uh you know and

and trickling down to company and then tune level, you know, like you need to produce bodies. You need to produce enemy dead. And as a standalone metric that's problematic, I mean, aside from the fact that's macabre and all that, and I realize it's kind of a gross thing to talk about that makes people uncomfortable. But this is very much like, I mean, this is the stuff of modern warfare, okay? But it took on a significance and to itself in Vietnam owing again to the kind of, to the kind of, to the kind the culture of strategic planning but it wasn't just spillover from you know the uh the kind of a the data revolution spearheaded by um idm and it's got to proto computers you know that were

utilized uh in the second world war and um and and you know thereafter obviously you know the victory metric of in nuclear war is very much distilled down to you know the ability to the like the ability to yield um you know enemy dead at uh beyond like a certain tipping point you know that's that's literally what the term you know like mega death indicates an assured destruction mega death was not just you know the name of like kind of a you know like a like a fucking heavy metal man you know like it actually air grid operator of ireland's electricity grid is powering up the northwest we're We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area and your input and local knowledge

are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i.4 slash Northwest. 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 breathtaking views of Dublin City from the home of Guinness. Live entertainment, great memories and the gravity bar. My goodness, it's Christmas at the Guinness Storehouse. Book now at ginnestorehouse.com. Get the facts. Be drinkaware.

Visit drinkaware. It actually was a term of art, if not. nuclear war studies and game theory. But be as it may, there is something to, there is something to this logic of the body count. I mean, if you're, if the burn rate that that you're imposing upon the opposing force, you know, far exceeds

the population in military age males, you know, who can be trained, equipped, and fielded, you know, to replace those losses, at some point, you know, the insurgency is going to fall apart, or it's at least not going to be able to mount operations, you know, beyond, you know, like platoon level or something. And this did work in a sense. I'm one of the few defenders you'll find in the Phoenix program. um we'll get into that at another date and people who don't really understand it like even people

or otherwise sensible like it's become this kind of it's become this kind of horror story that they like to bandy about you know that um you know it's kind of synonymous in their mind you know it's taking on kind of the the characteristic of uh it's become kind of like the exemplar of of uh of executive overreach and and violence they're in you know but it um something like that identifying enemy cadres I mean if you have a reliable system

of identifying these people and targeting them for annihilation um with a minimum of collateral damage um where possible

that's basically how you fight uh counterinsurgency warfare or how you wage counterinsurgency warfare and uh that's what the british army started doing by the late 90s in northern ireland uh the way they did it obviously was or by by the late 80s i mean sorry but not the late 90s but the um this uh this this this was underway in vietnam um at the same time that you know there was this kind of uh There's just kind of like body count driven effort in, you know, being waged by, you know, conventional forces, you know, to rack up the body count.

And I mean, obviously, this led to all kinds of problems, you know, wherein these numbers were confabulated, you know, civilians were counted as a, as enemy combatants. You know, like really, very, very corrupt things happen, you know, of a moral and of material nature. but that happens in every war right yeah exactly and it's also this didn't like somehow emerge in magna merrim this gougain this ghoulish guy who was like oh well i have an idea you know let's let's transform the military apparatus into this kind of corpse manufacturing uh enterprise you know because that's just a great thing to do i mean this was this was the thinking at the time and frankly too i mean it there's a again the cold war was strange i mean in some ways there's commonality to all uh you know to to to all conflicts where there's uh uh at you know um where there's where there's certain variables present

you know that that uh um that cause you know combat to resolve in similar ways you know adjusting for technology and things you know like within within spirit theaters and across you know across you know the temporal divide and stuff but uh there were strange things about the cold war that limited what was possible not just because the threat of escalation you know even in even in a very secondary theater excuse me it was always present but also again if you're fighting a primarily political war um you know we're not just talking about we're not talking about the enemy's ability to field military age males um you know, who can be trained as infantry or sappers or whatever.

Not every man is going to make it as a Viet Cong that requires a certain radicalism within, you know, within, you know, the, quote, heart and mind of that individual. You know, I mean, it's not, if you're, if you're looking to build an insurgent army, particularly in a situation, like what the Vietnamese is called the American War, where, you know, basically there's like an 80% chance you're going to die like you're not it's not like being drafted into the US army and you know to go fight the Korean war

like a very different thing you know like you every man pretty much needs to be a partisan and yeah you know there were there were there were a there were NLF fighters you know who were basically like press ganged and you know like joining the

Viet Cong and stuff but that that was the minority because you don't get results out of people like that you know I mean so it um the idea that we've got to kill as many of these people as possible in a targeted capacity. And, you know, killing them is an end in itself because that's a victory metric in order to kind of alter, you know, the political conditions on the ground. And how these conditions translate to the military power, you know, albeit in an asymmetrical way.

Like that, that is a real thing. And that's a legit analysis. I'm not saying legit and moral terms or whatever. I'm not rendering a decision on that one or the other. But in terms, there is a tactical logic to that. It's not insane or something or totally off base. Nor is it the kind of 1960s, you know, technocrat version of Chateau generalship. And I think that that's important. But moving on, McNamara became very, very skeptical of administration policy.

not just because Johnson, as we talked about, you know, Johnson viewed escalation and the threat of escalation as a kind of political bargaining ship, which is not how you wage a war. Okay, I mean, that's not, and I mean, you're, first of all, you're playing with the lives of the men, you know, who are charged with fighting that war, but also it just doesn't, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't work. You know, that's not the going to thing that yields concessions. and it doesn't it doesn't it doesn't it doesn't instill fear in the opposing force you know it basically

tells them that you know eventually you're going to be willing to compromise because otherwise at the end of the day you know if you if that was not the case you know you'd be fighting this war there'd be no restraint on the rules of engagement and like don't get me wrong you know uh the uh despite uh despite the kind of the besides kind of canards you like oh America was like fighting the Vietnam War with one hand tied around his balls or something. I mean, we killed a huge amount of people in Vietnam, okay? Like some real cowboy shit was going on. I'm not, I'm not trashing the war effort at all, okay?

Like, unlike World War II, I think within the bound of rationality of the Cold War, like I've said, Vietnam had to be fought, okay? but there was a lot of there was there was a lot of wholesale killing of human beings according to pretty loose criteria

you know the tactical restraints there was you know the literally the parameters that were imposed on the operational environment like yeah that had a that that rendered victory

problematic okay like no doubt about it but it um but the uh but uh but this idea that you know

America was like hesitating to drop bodies in Vietnam going to crazy ROE like that's that's that's completely facile but the uh but what I'm gonna realize

was that uh you know the dropping more and more deploying more and more men to Vietnam was not going to solve the problem. You know, nor was a, nor was a nor was the problem that, you know, the

bombing campaign wasn't intense enough or something. You know, like he basically reached the conclusions, you know, that we're going to talk about now. And like a lot of, like, like a lot of what I'm drawing upon to describe his mindset and describe some of the extant challenges

of the Secretary of the Secretary of Defense in his epoch, I'm drawing upon his own direct testimony, you know, I mean, among other things, obviously, but Magdimer, in winter of 1967, McNurman, as far as this is just freezing troop levels. And, and basically to prepare, McNamara said, like, well, then, you know, we don't, we don't have an indefinite timetable, you know, to make South Vietnam, like, combat ready,

in terms of their forces in being, you know, to stand on their own against the North. You know, like basically he said that the situation is not going to improve on the ground. Either, you know, either the Army of the Republic of Vietnam can fight now or it's, or, or, or, or it can't fight. You know, two years from now, the situation is not going to, is not going to be radically different. This was rejected outright by Johnson. And that's, you know, it was November 29th of 67 that McNair announced his pending resignation. nation. He didn't retire until February 68, or resign

rather. But that, I mean, that thing was a strong road, the camel's bat. Okay, I think McNamara gave it his all in Vietnam for years. He risked his reputation. He probably risked, like, a lot of his, a lot of his

moral, he probably compromised a lot of his, a lot of his, a lot of his moral commitments, too, frankly. I'm not going to sit here and make a martyr out of him. He took the job. And, I mean, if you're secretary of defense i mean you're you're dealing with the deaths of human beings you got to be okay with it but um the you know he for for this is what he did for for seven years almost and uh when when he when he when he approached his commander in chief and said like this is a situation as it stands

uh i i mean johnson base just like waved him off like dismissed him you know i mean i and i'm not saying that magnumara quit because you know, on grounds like mansuelling ego or something at all. But I can't even imagine being in that role particularly to consider like what was underway in the country.

You know, and your secretary of defense, like literally the man who, you know, who you rely upon more than any singular figure. I mean, in that administration, you know, to give you the straight story on the strategic situation.

Like, he tells you exactly that. that, you know, and exactly what, what, you know, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what the, what, what, what the, what, what the, what your options are as, as commander in chief, you know, and you simply dismiss him because like that, that doesn't comport with, like, your own conceptual prejudices. I mean, it's incredible, but, um, it was, it was a terrible person and a terrible chief executive, you know, it's, um, but that, that, that doesn't need to be rehashed, but who succeeded, who succeeded, who succeeded, who succeeded, he was Clifford very briefly. That's not like a Yaley, like, old America, like name. I don't know what is. But he was kind of a placeholder. The true success in a McNamara was a guy named Melvin Laird. He's kind of forgotten to history. But Melvin Laird loomed really large over the late Cold War. um his deputy uh what was no worry about clifford was what of his like one of his chief uh like assistants was paul nitsa you know and paul nitsa was you know he was the co-founder of team b and uh you know

until he was like quite elderly like he he uh like nitsa was even like he was he was he was drafting uh he was he was drafting um policy statements uh on behalf of uh the project for new american century you know like as is as late as the early 2000s you know like he he's he's he's one of these he's one of these kinds of i mean not just sound old dramatic he's one of these nitsch was one of these shadowy figures um of the defense establishment you know who who really was uh you know who really was kind of like a hidden eminence but uh that's really all that's remarkable about Clifford. Laird, uh,

Laird was interesting, and there was, uh, how long, how long we've been going here? I don't know if I should, um, I don't know if I should, um, I don't know if I should dive into, I don't know I should dive into, yeah, we'll get started on Melvin Laird and,

and then, and then, and then, like, we'll, we'll, like, deep dive properly into, like, Nixon's war next episode, if that's cool. Because it requires, uh, I'm not intimately dragging this out, but it, there's just, like, a lot here. But Melvin Laird, some people, some people talk about him like he was a hands-off, secretary defense, either willing to, you know, Nixon being an imperial executive who bullied his cabinet.

Like, that's complete nonsense. Other people cast Laird as this guy who, you know, in deliberate effort to strike a contrast to McNamara, you know, was averse to, you know, setting a policy course. in in its own right emergent from the Secretary of Defense's office it's not now those things are correct

Laird actually was very much engaged in the course of policy and he very much became an enemy of Nixon Kissinger and this set implications for Watergate which in my opinion was, you know, just a coup against Nixon, but what we'd view today is the deep state.

You know, I, this certainly was a kind of shadow government in those days. You broke up there. You broke up there for a second. Were you referring to it as you said that the people who would have carried out Watergate would have been comparable to today what we call the deep state? Oh, yeah, definitely. Definitely. It's just that the, it, like, the, like, government was different in the Cold War in certain key ways. But, I mean, so, like, I'm not, I mean, yeah, okay, we get, I mean, if you want to talk about it in linear terms, like, yeah, I get, we can, we can look at it as, as kind of, you know, the, the phenomenon in common.

Um, but the, but Laird, yeah, uh, the, I, I think Laird's hostility to Nixon and Kissinger, it took out a very personal tenor, which is, I mean, I think. But in pure policy terms, Larry's vision, I think he was wrong, but he wasn't totally off base. If you'd he viewed Vietnam

as essentially weakening the United States, not just in material terms, but he said that, you know, essentially he's like, you got a war-weary country now, you know, then like that they're now being

969 you know he's like if a general war broke out you know broke out with Warsaw Pact tomorrow you know you know with the country really have the political will you know to fight

the Soviet Union Warsaw Pact in Central Europe you know it's sacrificed like a million and a half young people you know on the on the heels of what we've already endured in the Southeast Asia secondly he's like you know the the Soviet Union was advantaged as we talked about before in terms of the fact that you know it it basically had pre-existing cadres on the ground throughout the third world um owing in a large part

you know to kind of the anti-colonial movement and other things and like a basic hostility um you know to the west in in profound terms not to superficial ones Um, and, uh, but also like a lot of these, a lot of these movements, like including the National Liberation Front itself, you know, they'd been engaged, uh, in combat either against the axis or, you know, against, uh, or against, uh, or against the Portuguese, the French or the English or, you know, any of these, uh, any of these fading, um, you know, colonial powers. The Soviet Union was able to really kind of spare its, its own blood and treasure. Um, meanwhile, it really kind of had the United States as number in terms of its war fighting doctrine, in terms of its strengths and weaknesses, you know, and, uh, while, uh, while America was, you know, while America was taking heavy casualties in Vietnam, you know, and, uh, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, you know, the Soviet Union was really was, was, was, was, uh,

was under had undertaken if someone had a revolution in military affairs you know but it had done so without you know like paying any cost in blood and uh laird had a good point there and uh this became very evident um post detaac i think and that's one of the reasons why um when reagan took the oath of office you know a decade later um there really was a sense that um warsaw pac constituted a clear and present danger that wasn't it wasn't just proper agand or you know um a precursor to war fever or something um or a or an iteration of war fever what have you um what leard did do was he said uh you know his big thing where where we're and nixon converged he said that you know uh we've uh we've got to be we got to be more assertive in in foreign affairs uh we got to be we got to strengthen you know us influence you know, over the, over what was then the European community, you know, because the EU didn't exist yet. Um, you know, he's like, we've got to consolidate, um, we, we've got to consolidate, you know, the hold we have on Japan and Korea, you know, to make sure that's permanent. Um,

you know, and, uh, he said that, you know, absolutely a credible nuclear deterrent is essential to, is essential to sound foreign policy. But he said that strong conventional defense is, is just as important. You know, and the, he came back to this point again and again, like I said, he's like, you know, you're,

you're going to basically turn people against the military establishment and we're constantly engaged in these brush fire wars. And I understand that point, but I don't accept it, but it, you know,

my point is, like I said, like it wasn't, it wasn't some crazy idea. It's, uh, the Vietnamization, uh,

regime. You know, Nixon's policy of disengagement with the South, you know, while buttressing its forces in being, you know, in material terms, as well as, as well as in terms of morale, and, you know, transform the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, it is something combat capable. That very much, that policy course very much came from Nixon, but Melvin Laird, or the rubber

met the road, you know, kind of sought to it being implemented. So he does his props for that. The, one of the early rifts between Laird and, and Nixon and Kissinger, I mean, basically

the entire, like, executive, basically the entire executive national security staff of the White House, like, you know, other than himself. In 69, that's when the secret bombing of Cambodia began.

Cambodia was officially neutral. I mean, they were engaged in their own bloody civil war. There was all kinds of intrigues there. And what's fascinating is that is the Senate of Soviet split kind of set in, there was very much a proxy war between the Soviet Union and Red China in Cambodia.

You know, between the Soviet client, North Vietnamese, like later, just, you know, the Vietnamese army and the Khmer Rouge. but that makes an increasingly sidelined Laird

in these key decisions and there's an interesting parallel with Iran-Contra there which Warns mentioned I won't deep dive into that now because obviously we'd be here all afternoon but it's Laird

Laird understood Laird said basically look like this wasn't a matter of pride is you know it's not a matter of me being affronted that, you know, despite the fact on the Secretary of Defense I'm being left out of these decisions. But he said there's an inevitable public disclosure

of these bombings. And public outrage, authentic or not, cultivated or not by hostile elements, is going to harm, the harm wrought by that is going to neutralize any. tactical advantage by hitting these north these north Vietnamese sanctuaries in

Cambodia and Larry was actually right about that and again I mean me what what was the anti-war movement and was it was its focus on these discrete policy decisions you know like the secret bombing in Cambodia was that like authentic outrage I don't know okay not at all it was um it was it was the it was the 1968 equivalent of Soros Inc. You know, color revolutioning the American Street against Mr. Nixon

and the Vietnam War, with, of course, the help of Warsaw Pacted intelligence agencies. But that didn't matter. The point is, that's what it would be a catalyst for. And of course, I mean, the, you can almost hear the Nixon rebuttal of that of, you know, we're not going to let these, like,

we're not going to let some, like, Tommy Coxuckers in Berkeley, like, dictate, like, the course of policy. particularly not, you know, the course of war and peace decisions because, you know, bombing nominally neutral states that are actually communist sanctuaries is bad PR. But Laird was absolutely right. Okay. And, you know, you, if you're the President of the United States, you know, you're presiding over the political culture that you're presiding over.

And this guy as it may be, you know, like comically improper as it may be, you know, you know, you are dealing with a hostile media, if you're a Mr. Nixon or Mr. Trump, that's going to do everything in his power to remove you from office, and these things must be considered. Now, that does not mean that you refrain from assaulting Cambodia, if it's a, if it's a tactical necessity. What it does mean is that you finesse it the right way, and you don't do it in secret and cut the Secretary of defense out of the equation.

but that that really kind of uh that really uh that really uh that really was kind of the nail in the cooperative of the relationship between laird and um and nixon and kessinger and later when when it was disclosed when the bombing in cambodia was disclosed and um these mass protests broke out which were the precursor to the kent state uh tragedy um which i don't know people i I didn't know that until fairly recently. I mean, I knew when the, I knew when the Cambodia bombies occurred. I knew when Kent State happened. I didn't realize that, like, at least the nominal pretext for the big protest was the bombing in Cambodia.

But when this was disclosed in media, Nixon, through Kissinger, very publicly accused Laird of leaking it. You know, just, uh, um, which is a pretty, which is a pretty, pretty serious allegation. Um, I haven't deep-dived into the issue. I can't really comment on that. I would have been surprised if that was the case. Um, somebody, Laird was a serious guy, however you were I feel about his politics. Um, he wouldn't have compromised. A guy like Laird wouldn't have compromised, though, you know, an active war effort, you know, to stick it to Mr. Nixon or to score points with, um, he wouldn't have compromised. with with Woodward and Bernstein types. I just can't see that happening. But be as it may,

this was yet another, I mean, this was even another dysfunction of the Nixon White House. I mean, don't get me wrong. I think Nixon was actually fighting the Vietnam War to win it. And next episode, we'll also get into the man of Creighton Abrams, General Creight and Abrams, who's exceeded Westmoreland. And I think a Westmoreland almost like a McClellan of his era,

you know, like very much, very much, very much a bean counter or like a lesser, or like a middle-level executive and not particularly innovative company, you know, in an army uniform. How Westmoreland advanced the way he did remains a mystery, but again, I don't, there's obviously not a hell of a lot I can add. There's obviously not a hell of a lot of insight I have into the U.S. military culture, and, I mean, having not seen it from within.

But the, we'll wrap up here in a minute so that because the next kind of sub-top I'm going to get into is huge. But the if there's a legacy to Laird, I think he was very much the last kind of like Secretary of Defense

that had any real independence in policy matters. Not because he was such an incredible dynamic guy, but because subsequent presidents did not make a mistake that Nixon did. Your Secretary of Defense during the Cold War, in my opinion, was

arguably as important as as one's selection for attorney general. But that's a that could be I guess they could be argued a number of different ways. But I think this might be a kind of a

natural stopping point. I You can do your, you can do your plugs. You can also announce that Twitter is being Twitter again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I'm on my seventh. I'm on my seventh or eighth account, you know.

I was suspended from Twitter the week Elon took over. It's just bizarre. And like, they suspended him and Ace is a legit guy. And he's afraid to speak his mind. Like, what would he doesn't, he has, he like blogs about, I mean, he's, he's like kind of a mega guy. But what the hell is he dropping that's offensive to Twitter? You know, like it's just totally random.

Except his, except his love. Except his love for a docking back for the attack. That's the only thing that really loves me, that is. But it, like, makes no sense. Like, even, like, the things that even usually throw, like, their triggers, like, he, or whatever, like, he, like, why bad him? But it, um, but the, but yeah, I mean, and it's, I, I, I, but who people not, every time, this has happened literally a dozen times. It happens, like, every several weeks. Every other than happens to people act like I die or something.

It's like, I do a lot of just, like, goofy shit posting on Twitter. I drop some serious stuff there too, but that's like it's kind of a big nothing, man. Like I use it to promote what we're doing so that our people can find us, you know, and tune in for like the stuff we're doing here. But this idea that it's like this awesome platform that we need. We don't fucking need that shit. Like I built my brand when I was on no social media at all. Okay. I do have an account there that is active.

But I'm going to be low key about it because like I don't know. who the hell knows like what they're you know what the kind of um one can never tell like what what the lay of the land is in terms of you know the I mean who can predict arbitrary and capricious action which is by definition is arbitrary and capricious but um I'm transitioning to YouTube um that's like my primary platform I'm going to back it up on Odyssey and stuff yes I realize YouTube is censorious as well but um I mean I mean we're we're kind of kind of we're kind of leaving Twitter behind anyway but yeah so I don't want people acting like this is like the end of the fucking world like it just it bothers me when

people act that way but the what the um yeah I mean finding out substack real thomas 7777.com I'm on Instagram um just at like number seven H-O-B-S 7777 the YouTube channel is launching at the end of the month like I said I'm very excited about it um like I really am it I there's a lot of potential there. And I think people will be very happy with it. And I'm very blessed to have some really great people helping me produce it, because I certainly would be pissing into the wind on the production side, or not for them.

But, yeah, and Steelstorm 2 is available at Imperium Press. That's the second installment in my science fiction series. So, yeah, please check it out. If you're a fan of my work product and or science fiction. And that's, that's all I got. Well, once again, thank you. And until the next time. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Kinyanez show, part nine of the Cold War series.

How you doing, Thomas? I'm very well. Thanks. Today, I wanted to talk about something that's sort of a forgotten addendum to the Vietnam War. And like I raised before we went live, there's some pretty haunting things about Vietnam. I don't understand how dramatic. And I don't mean in the way that is presented in most court history narratives. But there are, there's a lot of dishonesty about the conflict, particularly among, you know, in the accounts of men who served in the executive branch.

Now, if you go to the Vietnam War Memorial, you know, the wall in Washington, D.C., and I didn't notice this until 2000. five. You know, these, the black marble or granite, whatever it is, I'm not a big fan of Memorial, honestly, like the way it's designed. I think it's kind of morbid, but as it may. Each section is designated by conflict year, you know, so it's like all the men who died in 1967 and hostile action, you know, they'll be like their names. The final panel is 1975. So I figured, okay, that's probably, I didn't think there were any casualties of the embassy Marines or whatever during an occupation or operation, I think it was enduring wind. The evacuation of Saigon, but I noticed there's like 38 or some names on it.

And I'm like, that's not right. And lo and behold, the men who died on Kotang, the Battle of Kotank, Island against the Khmer Rouge where it's kind of as an afterthought tacked on to the Vietnam War wall, which doesn't make any sense. The Battle of Kotang was not the final battle of the Vietnam War.

It was against an entire, it was against, you know, it was waged against an entirely different regime in an entirely different country for totally unrelated reasons. And I found that to be kind of grotesque. But

some years later, Rumsfeld, wrote a couple of books. He wrote his autobiography, and then he wrote his memoirs. And Rumsfeld really cut his teeth in government as the White House Chief of Staff from the Ford administration. And he talked about the battle of Kotang. Like, it was this great operation.

And, you know, there was only, I think he said there was only three casualties, which is perverse, and we'll get into why. It was just like an out-and-out lie. And this disturbed me. I mean, I suppose the rebuttal would be, well, you know, Rumsfeld was recalling things then that were, you know, 35 years in the past. Rumsfeld had a photographic memory. He used to brag about that. And my dad made the point, when my dad got out of the army, he went to work for McGeorge Bundy.

And they developed kind of a rapport, you know, and my dad used to drive him around and stuff like that. and my dad met Rumsfeld during his tenure with Bundy. You know, my dad was just like a nobody, you know, so there was no reason for Rumsfeld to remember him. And then decades later, my dad ran to Rumsfeld at some like CFR thing, and Rumsfeld addressed him by his first name because he just, that's the way the guy is. So Rumsfeld, what I'm getting is, Rumsfeld did not forget what the casualties were at Kotang.

And he didn't just get confused about. you know what actually happened there um nor do i believe that somebody ghost wrote the book and rumsfeld didn't fact check it so i mean that's um i guess what what kind of jumped out of me is that this this was still being kind of swept under the rug like decades later so what was the may jagas incident and why is it important well um on may 12th ninety seventy five uh a uh an american cargo ship S.S. Mayagas at a crew at 39. It was off the

territorial coast of Cambodia, which was then ruled by the Khmer Rouge, weeks before it had conquered the capital. They got captured. The Khmer Rouge

claimed that they were in territorial waters. The captain of the Mayagas subsequently claimed like they were fired upon by T by P.T. boats and, you know, corralled into Cambodian territory. Regardless, this whole crew was seized. This had echoes of when the North Koreans had seized the Pueblo, which was a Navy intelligence vessel in 1968. and the North Koreans grabbed the Pueblo at the height of the Tet Offensive.

And being that it was an intelligence ship, the North Koreans were able to seize encryption equipment. And it's believed that John Walker, not John Walker, Lynn, a different John Walker, who became associated with infamy in treason. He was this naval officer who, as it turned out, was spying for the Soviet Union for decades. And it's believed that, you know, the North Koreans conveyed this naval encryption equipment to Moscow. Walker then provided Moscow with, like, the, with the ciphers so that they could, you know, that the Soviets could decode, you know, the encrypted language. So, I mean, this was a big deal, you know, and it, it, it, and it, you know, it, you know, it, and it, you know, it, you know, there, even if Johnson had a stronger mandate and even if the Vietnam War was going better,

the United States wasn't really in a position, you know, opened up another front in Asia and, you know, wage war with North Korea. But there's evidence that in part the North Koreans via the Chinese were very much trying to facilitate that. But that's a little bit outside the scope. But in any event, Ford was not going to allow a repeat of the Pueblo incident. So immediately, obviously, you know, the National Security Council convened Secretary of Defense, which at the time was Schlesinger, who I've got nothing nice to say about people who remember him at all, generally remember him for some incredibly slanderous things that he said about President Nixon. but he uh you know Nixon played musical chairs with his cabinet um kind of like mr trump did although there was obviously there was more kind of rhyme and reason to to Nixon's staff decisions

but uh Schlesinger had succeeded Elliott Richardson Elliott Richardson had succeeded melvin laird like none of these men like serve for more than several months okay but uh he was a holdover from the Nix administration, for better or worse. So is Kissinger, who is Secretary of State at the time. And what's important to keep in mind during this time is that there was no special operations command. U.S. military was kind of a mess. You know, this was only, this was less than a year and a half after the draft.

had ended. The all-volunteer force was being implemented. There's a drawdown in the number of division-sized combat-capable formations. So basically,

the Cold War flashpoints in Europe and Asia were really being manned by a skill and crew, as it were. And there was not just like rapid deployment capability. And there was no special operations command. So, you know, the kind of instinctive response people have in reading about the Mayagas is like, well, why didn't, you know, why didn't Socom or its predecessor just like deploy Navy sealed or something? Like that infrastructure didn't exist. And also, and as the crow flies, I think the closest combat capable force to Cambodia. would have been located in Okinawa in 1975.

Okay, like this was, this was, this was high to the Cold War. You know, this was not, America did not have, you know, forward deployments all over this planet, you know, that, and it didn't have the command of control, nor the force isn't being, you know, to respond to something like this instantaneously. I mean, it seems short-sighted, I guess, the people today, but that's history in the rearview mirror. This kind of thing was not really within a contemplation of the Department of Defense either.

It was not the kind of exigencies that were emergent in 1975 in any kind of regular or predictable capacity. But as it may, like we talked about, like we talked about last couple of episodes. Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge was absolutely a client regime. other people's republic of china this created some strange intrigues as um you know peking was decoupled from moscow in a real way and this was you know solidified by the efforts of a nixon and kissinger america had to tread somewhat lightly um to um in order to preserve that um just a uh an immediate kind of um broad spectrum assault on on Khmer Rouge, Cambodia, which they had, they were calling Democratic Campucia, that would have caused real problems. And that could have, that wouldn't have,

the, the, the, the, the, the, the soviet split by that point was the, the chasm was too great, proverbially. That wouldn't have driven the Chinese back into the arms of Warsaw Pact, but it definitely would have generated momentum in that direction. Okay. So that's kind of the subtext of this. And that's one of the reasons why I think it's an important, it's not just, you know, like a footnote of history. It's something that deserves to be talked about, not just because the men that were lost there and the three of them in particular suffer an utterly horrible fate that we'll get into. But it's imperative to understand, you know, how complicated and how strange the late Cold War became.

And obviously later, you know, in 1979, the Hanoy government quite literally went to war with China. And, uh, concomitantly, you know, the Vietnamese assaulted into Cambodia, deposed the Khmer Rouge, and this, you know, decades-long conflict ensued, you know, between the Vietnamese occupiers and the Khmer Rouge have been driven off into the bush, which was very much a proxy war between the people's public of China and the Soviet Union, which, I mean, not to be flippant about it because, I mean, you know, this, the cost in human suffering was immense, but creating, generating that conflict was kind of a masterstroke of the Nixon White House. and subsequent administrations who continue to cultivate that divide and conquer strategy. But there's some evidence if one knows what to look for. The Chinese had absolutely no interest in sabotaging the kind of strategic alliance with America, which was then still pretty fresh. But at the same time, you know, China was not America's friend.

and they were just as prone to intrigues as ever. I believe that the Chinese probably directed the Khmer Rouge to seize the Miegas, or at least once it happened, you know, they endorsed that move. And I think the long game for Peking was that they could intervene as like negotiator, it would be a way to kind of bloody Uncle Sam's nose in terms of global credibility, you know, cast China as, you know, kind of a, the arbiter of, of war and peace affairs in the Orient. And plus, it would generate goodwill, at least in Peking's mind, with, you know, whatever government replaced the Ford administration.

And that sounds totally backwards and strange, but that's the, the way that the Chinese think and thought, it is. It's an arguable. Examples are myriad. If people think I'm just, you know, kind of mouthing off, they don't like the Chinese or whatever. But this was a delicate situation is what I'm getting at, you know, beyond the obvious fact that any kind of hostage rescue operation

is kind of the worst possible. in operational terms, circumstance to emerge. You know, one doesn't need to be, one doesn't need to be some high-speed military type to recognize that. But the way it played out in operational terms

was for, it was in form of the seizure of the Mayegas at his morning briefing on the six. 16th. Like I said, the National Security Council was convened. Brent Scowcroft, who as I'm sure people will recognize, you know, later went on to play a major role in the Reagan administration, particularly Reagan's first term. You know, he basically early on in the crisis was the one who, you know, convened what ultimately became, you know, the parties who, you know, determined what the operational response would be for better or worse um the uh the um the big concern

i mean obviously aside from the you know the issues i just indicated we're relating to a relating to uh u.s chinese relations and everything else uh america had a major credibility problem and like we talked you know owing to the fall of sagon um and as we talked about I think last episode. I'm not just overstating that because it's kind of my peculiar emphasis as a revisionist. This was in the Cold War, particularly as a strategic parody set in,

which in the later Brezhnavera was, I mean, was kind of the, you know, what was the height of that kind of paradigm shift. The United States enjoying credibility and its ability to project power successfully, you know, in the third world. That's basically what the entire Truman doctrine hinged upon. And the entire American Cold War strategy in military terms hinged on the Truman Doctrine.

Okay. So coming off of a defeat in Saigon, despite, you know, however much that had been mitigated by the sound of Soviet split, in pure military and strategic terms, if America had proven unable or lacking in the will to respond to the seizure that Mayegas and its crew in military operational terms, that would have had real world consequences. And that's really what was on the minds of Ford himself and everybody in his national security cap. that um ford immediately issued a statement declaring that the seizure of the vessel was an act of piracy which is interesting language which wasn't really precedented and uh the context to understand that statement within it wasn't just him it wasn't just the president relying upon you know kind of cringe polemic what he was saying was i mean this this was the era when people were banding that you know the president had to have you know expiry from Congress before he

acted in the article 2 commander-in-chief role and like nonsense like the War Powers Act was being floated okay I don't want to start a constitutional debate but that kind of stuff was emerging from the hangover over the Vietnam conflict that does not have a leg to stand on

according to the letter of the Constitution but because that was the tenor of discourse for it to send some kind of message that you know he was not going to he was not going to await some kind of congressional debate on whether or not you know he was authorized he was forcing us the Khmer Rouge you know he was saying like you know this is outside of the bounds of uh of ordinary international relations and you know I'm going to respond to where I see fit that's reading between the lines I find that very interesting um I can't think of a more unenviable position to be in than you know the American president in the aftermath of Watergate being faced with a kind of

asymmetrical national security crisis like this that calls for immediate decisive action that I mean that's never a particularly desirable situation to find oneself in but in that era

and specifically in that moment weeks after the fall of Saigon like I can't even imagine but Secretary of State Schlesinger what he did immediately was he directed the Joint Chiefs to order

their people in theater to locate the Mayegas and at all cost prevent the vessels movement to mainland Cambodia. Employing all necessary munitions required to do that but obviously taking care or not to harm

you know the the hostage crew Kissinger and this was fascinating immediately went into action but he didn't contact the Khmer Rouge or attempt to what he did was he contacted the Chinese liaison office in Washington and he immediately demanded to release the Mayagus and to convey that message

to the Khmer Rouge on the ground um the uh whoever the formal diplomatic representative of Beijing was refused to accept the note saying basically I can't take responsibility for this

Gizinger then tapped George Herbert Walker Bush who at that time was leading the counterpart liaison office in Beijing he delivered the note personally to the Chinese foreign ministry and he

according to Bush himself and I don't see why he would lie about this he conveyed orally that if there was not you know if the immediate release of the mayagas crew was not um you know was not realized that uh the commier rouge be held responsible um collectively and there'd be a massive shock and awe assault on penh and um again the this wasn't just diplomatic protocol that both kissinger and then bush approach China. I mean, it goes to show you

what was underway behind the scenes and that this obviously the most charitable view to take of it is that, well, you know, the Khmer Rouge, they were paranoid psychos and it was this kind of backwards revolutionary regime. They grabbed them a Jagas just because they were

paranoid. Then when they realized, you know, that it was a U.S. flagged vessel, they freaked out and didn't know what to do. The most kind of punitive view of it is that you know, what I, the possibility raised a moment ago was that the Chinese orchestrated this as you know part of a Machiavillian kind of intrigue drama which they've done in the past frankly and continue to do so today albeit and was punctuated in violent terms but regardless Washington obviously was aware that

you know China was either responsible for this in approximate causal terms or had the power to force a resolution and that tells you everything you need to know about the relationship between the Khmer Rouge, the Vietnamese, the Soviet Union, China, and the United States. Subsequently, the Khmer Rouge tried to do exactly that, release the Mayagus crew unharmed, which we'll see. And I think that further substantiates, you know, my kind of spitball analysis. But I, like I said, I'm not just speculating. conspiracy theorizing. I think anyone who spends time with the factual record and, you know, kind of read between the lines of American diplomacy speak, I think this becomes clear, okay? Back to the kind of practical operational side of it, though. The, it was on the following day, it was confirmed that the Mayegas was off the coast of Kotang.

which is an island in Cambodian territorial waters, which the Khmer Rouge had fortified after the... after Phnom Pen fell, which it later became clear that they'd done so in anticipation of a Vietnamese naval assault because their big fear was that it would be used as a staging ground to assault the mainland, presumably as a secondary theater

to divert Camero's forces and being from whatever across border loca had been the the sphere punk as it were of the potential Vietnamese assault I can't speak to how

problem that would have been because I mean who knows but it wasn't it it it was entirely reasonable to you know anticipate that at the time and with what was underway and I mean ultimately the Vietnamese did. I mean, that's what the pose of to Khmer Rouge was a Vietnamese attack.

So, I mean, this was not just, this was not just an alibi of the regime, whatever else we can say about it and its credibility. The absence of combat cable American forces in theater, again, was the big problem.

The closest truly convictable element was the 2nd Battalion, 9th Marines who were then engaged in a training, who were then engaged in a training of size on Okinawa. And on the night of the 13th of May, which was the day after the seizure of the vessel itself, they were ordered to return a camp

and prepare for departure by air on May 14th. The problem was this was a heavy, I mean, this is, this was not this is the proverbial operation where one needs to go in light. I mean like again these days we would think of it as like a SEAL Team 6 or like a Delta Force kind of

operation and this is not really what people were training for at that time and there was an by 1975 there was a handful of officers with 2nd Battalion 9th Marines who had been

under fire in Vietnam but virtually none of the Inlisted matter NCOs had. You know, the idea taken, I mean, however tough these guys were, and I'm sure that they were like a hard dudes, taking, you know, taking a marine element that had not been in combat before and, you know, kind of breaking their proverbial sherry, you know, by having them assault a ship that had been taken hostage in a kind of anti-counterrorist operation. Like, it seems like a recipe for disaster.

would ultimately put the kibosh on that planned operation was a guy named General Burns. Yeah, Burns. He was commander of the 7th Air Force. He weighed in and said, look, you know, it's very possible that, you know, the crew has already been, you know, taken land side either on Kotang itself or as being shuttled to the mainland regardless he's like

you're going to need more firepower than just you know than can be brought to bear you know by dropping by dropping

by dropping by dropping Marines you know by chopper onto the vessel itself you know with you know kind of like light covering fire from whatever these i assume like i assume like hewee i don't know if hughy cobras were fielded then yet but um yeah yeah they would have been but i mean point being you know it burns to his credit was thinking ahead um and uh his idea was uh bring to bear uh

air force gunships and shoppers to be able to you know saturate uh the island with firepower of be and the uh you know the um the hostage rescue element he suggested uh the 56 security police squadron these are like the air force guys who like guard uh like air bases um at that at that time that's what they were like these days the air force has like a high speed like like spec war like element but in those days they basically had these guys were somewhat like more high speed like MPs, you know, and again, like, that's not really, that's not really, you know, the element you want for something like this. But his view at least was more kind of in line with what was to develop than, um, than, um, than that, then that, which was floated, uh, previously. Um, and, um, and this operation was actually implemented, um,

And the Utapo Air Base in Thailand, which I believe is still in use. Like the idea was that these gunships and these Air Force MPs, you know, who are the hostage rescue element, they're going to be shuttled from the Philippines to Utapo in Thailand. To be outfitted for sting. and then from there they were going to assault Kotang. On the way to Thailand, there was a chopper crash and like 18 of their number

were killed. So as you can see this, it was 18 of the security police and five crewmen. So I mean, as you can see, they're just getting like more and more Fubarb by the moment in operational terms. It sounds like trying to go

into Iran and get the hostages. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, that you're exactly right. And this coupled with Desert One, and, you know, which is the aborted Iranian rescue mission, and the lack of integrated command and control with Grenada, that's really what created Socom,

you know, because the need for it became recognized. Well, there was only one lost in Grenada, right? Was there one? I think there was only one casualty in Grenada, right? No, there was a number. and what happened was these Navy SEALs who were, um, there was a bunch,

there was a few, there was like, you know, there was an army command element, a Marine command element, and then there was these seals who, uh,

ended up somehow, uh, dropped in the wrong place and then, uh, they ended up drowning because they weren't retrieved. Oh, geez. Yeah,

it was a whole mess. And like it had to do, it was literally totally avoidable and it was like a command and control. 19 dead, 19 dead, 15 wounded. Yeah, yeah,

yeah. I mean, grenade is, we'll get into a grenade and we're, the later episodes because it's in political terms of it it bore directly on uh the uh the san an and eastern eastern revolution and um there was there was north koreans on the ground there i mean obviously was the cuban element there was a couple of east germans like it's fascinating and um it very much uh it very much is what the i mean however anybody feels about the regan administration and you know

some of its alleged overreach um that grenada actually was it was it was being purposed uh to rapidly reinforce Nicaragua and friendly proxies like in theater. You know, that was the only thing to building Renata was an airstrip for that purpose. And that's exactly what they were building. But be as it may, after this, after this, after this, after this, out of this disaster with, you know, at Utapo, So, for it can be another national security council meeting on May 14th, the, a communication link had been established with the 7th Air Force elements that had departed from Hawaii and were that circling Kotang. And in those days, those are close to you get to, like, real-time communications.

I mean, that's another thing we take for granted today, but obviously then, like, you were, there was quite literally. like blindness and theater. If you were the command element in the White House, you know, trying to direct military operations to the Joint Chiefs of staff. And then they in turn, you know, any, any data they were getting from the battle space

was, you know, minutes, at least minutes and probably hours out of date. The these fighters, they were trying to, what they didn't realize was that the crew by this time of the Mayagas,

had been shuttled to this fishing boat, which was then attempting to transport them to the mainland, this coastal city called Campong Somme. These guys, their credit, these pilots who were circling in theater, they recognized that that probably was going on. They requested permission to try to shoot the rudders off of the ship that was conveying them and to, like, assault the PT boats that were escorting it. Ford intervened and said that, you know, the use of those kinds of munitions would be, would present too great a risk to the crew.

So he put the gavash on that. The, at the same time, the National Security Council, they got word, they got word back that the Chinese foreign ministry in Beijing had refused to pass any kind of formal communication on to Khmer Rouge. but Bush said that in his but Bush said that he could all be guarantee that the Chinese are putting pressure on the Khmer Rouge to comply with whatever American demands were. It was like obviously even if

I mean like I said I've got my own theory on this that this was very much orchestrated by Beijing but whether it was or not obviously the situation was rapidly you know spiraling out of control and Bush

whatever whether a view of charitable or whether it's you know not particularly so Bush was a serious guy and he very much understood the Chinese and had a rapport with them and I mean he was a career intelligence man

if he relayed that in my belief you know this has been conveyed and this is what's happening I I think you know that was I think I think I think I think that was as good as gold but

the the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was a guy named David Jones. What he presented, and this was ultimately followed through in operational terms, he presented a range of military officers, the National Security Council, and he said, you know, look, like, we're not even sure where the Mayagas crew is at this point, you know, whether they're shipboard, whether they're land side, and if they're land side, and if they're land side where they're actually located. And he's like, obviously, like, they are, you know, rescuing them on harm needs to be our priority.

But he's like, we basically got to, like, waste the Camero Rouge because, like, we can't just, like, let this slide. You know, he's like, we've got to, this is a credibility issue above all else. You know, aside, you know, obviously, you know, we're not going to disregard the lives of our people. But, you know, we've got to, we've got to lay as much hurt on the Camer Rouge as we can. and from that point forward that was basically accepted by the White House it came down to three possibilities some intelligence suggested that

they were still on the Mayegas some suggested they were on Kotang Island others suggested that they were on the fishing boat itself route out on bound for the mainland and the coastal city of Kampong-Som which is what these Air Force pilots were laid, which turned out to be true, incidentally. But what was ultimately decided

was National Security Council decided to, they decided deploy the Marines to take the Mayagas itself, assault Kotang Island, and together the mass of assault on Cambodia itself, particularly its shipping and it's shipping infrastructure,

you know, any of all like, you know, naval military targets and escalating the Pannon Pett itself, unlike any other kind of like countervalue targets of opportunity that presented themselves, you know, if within, you know, 24 or 36 hours or whatever, you know, there wasn't resolution to the crisis. The fishing boat on which the Mayagus crew actually was, it did arrive at Kampong Sam.

Sam, the Khmer Rouge commander at Kampong Sam Sam, either he had either been, either the Chinese had gotten to him or he just understood what was underway. He issued in order to his men like, you know,

I don't know, you know, do not harm these hostages, you know, under any circumstances. You know, he asked these hostages, you know, he's like, you know, I mean, by that point of an established obviously it was an American flag ship. you know um and he uh he asked him if their radio equipment was was operable you know so that they

could yeah he's like look we're releasing you you know like can you call off this assault um and uh it was it turned out the radio equipment was not operable but the uh as it uh as it turned out later like one of the one of the guys later just closed he's like he's like i didn't know if we'd be able to reach like any of the aircraft in the air but he's like by that point, like, I wanted, he's like, I wanted to commit a room to get their ass kicked. So he's like, you know, he's like, I wouldn't have transmitted it anyway, which frankly, it was the right call, um, I think. But that's, um, but by that point, uh, the die was cast. Um, the, uh, the, um, it was at, uh, the, uh, it was at around just past dawn on, uh, May 16th.

Kotang itself was assaulted, but as it turned out, Intel suggested that there was only about 20 or 30 Commear Rouge fighters on the island. It turned out that there was over 100, and again, they, they had a lot of heavy machine guns among them and, like, and crew served, like, squad weapons, because, you know, like we talked about a moment ago, they fortified the island and is a patient of Vietnamese assault, which never came. But, you know, these, the Khmer Rouge, whatever you can say about, these guys were incredibly game fighters. This pitched battle ensued between the Marines and the Khmer Rouge.

The crew of the Mayagas was safely conveyed back from this fishing boat, like back to the Mayagas itself. and and and they were they were they were safely conveyed away from the battle space but uh when it became clear that the crew had been released and was safe um it uh the marines were uh ordered to withdraw um and they began uh affecting a tactical withdrawal like a fighting retreat as it were um But the Marine commander on the ground, there was two beachheads. At the eastern, the commander of the easternmost operational area, he conveyed, like, look, unless we're rapidly reinforced, like we're going to be overrun. So the reinforcements that have been called off were then directed back to Kotang

to reinforce the Marines on the ground. you know this in this kind of chaotic withdrawal that ensued there was a machine gun team of a three Marines that in this kind of craggy they did in this

kind of craggy area like on the beach itself like just outside of the ever kind of shrinking perimeter you know they'd set up a an ad hoc machine

gun nest. And they'd been left behind in the wake of the withdrawal. And one of the one of these guys, platoon mates had said on board the chopper, like,

you know, there's at least three men on the ground there. For some reason, this wasn't this wasn't abided. And I realized like in the middle of a hot LZ, like in the midst of a firefight. I mean, I'm sure things are confused, but this, uh, as it happened, um, these guys were left behind, managed to radio a passing U.S. naval vessel. And, um, apparently, uh, some intelligence

officers said, well, it's probably like a Camer Rouge trick in their, you know, like, I mean, it seems ridiculous. It seems like something like a corny old movie, like some Camer Rouge saying, like, yo, G. G.I. Joe, you'll send them all. You. Sun Marlene or what I mean like I would I mean that's I'm not making a light of a horrible situation but that um it seems to me by that point probably um everybody was looking to cover their own asses it became clear that you know they're like their head probably been men left behind these three guys are left behind um this became this like enduring kind of myth almost and I remember before I knew anything about the Mayegas before I'd like I mean I was always

fancy by Vietnam and I mean I ever since I could read. I was reading about, you know, about the Cold War and things. But I knew this guy in the early 90s. He was kind of a sad guy. You know,

he's kind of like the troubled Vietnam vet of myth and lore, you know, like he had a drug problem and stuff. But he, he got a pretty tight because we worked together. Like, we delivered pizzas together. You know, and he,

um, he'd, he, I talked about Vietnam. And he was really into the POW MIA movement, you know. And I kind of, just looked at it was like a sad guy who was troubled by the war and other things but he kept coming

back to kotang and saying you know they left guys behind you know in cambodia you know that means they left other guys behind and like uh like i'm not saying he was right about all these things he claimed but he wasn't just like talking shit you know like and he um that's this as it turns out the uh these guys were abandoned on kotang that that fed a lot of the speculation that the that the kind of POW movement, you know, derived their claims from. But it came out years later, these three guys, and they were just kids. I think, like, and they were like 18, 19, and 21 respectively. They were on the island for a week.

And the Cameroos realized that, like, some of their rice stores had gone missing and that, you know, boot prints that obviously weren't, you know, Camer Rouge sandals were found. Camerreras tracked these guys and they found them. They were shuttled in the mainland. You know, I mean, God knows what they were subjected to do by Cameruero's torturers. But after several days, they were, according to their jailers, they were beaten the death with the butt end of a B40 rocket launcher. I mean, I can't even imagine that, man.

like being being abandoned by uh by your own forces and then falling into the hands of the commier ruse like literally on this like god forsaken island i mean that's that's beyond a lot of stuff frightens me like at my age and frankly i've had some kind of awful experiences but that that that i mean i find that just like horrifying even even to think about you know and they're kids they should they're kids they should be home in the driveway working on a car they just bought yeah yeah Yeah, man. And it's like, of all people, of being captured by the Commit Rouge, the most horrifying thing I can think of of because, like, it's not just, like, the Commit Rouge really were animals. Like, it's not, I mean, like, it's not, I mean, like, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not some just, like, it's bullshit propaganda or something. Like, I mean, there's a lot of cases where, you know, if you're, if you're, if you're, if you're, if you're, you're dealing with an opponent, you're dealing with an op for there that are just guys like you. Like, in the case of the Commure Rouge, like, these, these guys were. fucking are barbarians, but the,

they seem like the the descendants of the the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Yeah, they, yeah, and there's just, there's like horrible stuff, like the, there actually were like, Daugman instance and says, like, cannibalism, just, like, terrorized people and stuff.

And, like, they, you know, they, it's one of the few witnesses, again, we're kind of the truth is, the truth is worse than a lot of the propaganda that came out. But it, um, but it's also, too like I think um I think a lot of this was suppressed uh for the reasons I said it was like this it was this bizarre like messy political and diplomatic situation um relating to the you know the intrigues um incident to the son of soviet split uh you know a lot of the uh the ongoing

hangover as it were from the Vietnam conflict and you know like I said just even the way it's treated is bizarre thank you to have the fact like this was just uh this was just you know it's just kind of like as an afterthought like slapped on to the Vietnam War Memorial was on this was you know that this happened sort of in theater

and sort of you know within the same decade so you know why not just you know why not just treat it as part of like the same part of the same kind of like nucleus of of conflict events but it yeah I

that's the that's the um that's the story of Kotank, man, and that's the, and that's the time, that's the, I believe,

and I mean, I've written about this in my fiction, like, I believe that, uh, I believe the U.S. engaged, the Khmer Rouge,

like, fairly regularly. I don't see how they could not have. Like, they were, you know, they were running around Cambodia, um,

for years, um, prior to 1970. And then in the aftermath, um, you know, even, uh,

even when, um, even when the U.S. and China, like, came to terms, and the U.S. began cultivating the Khmer Rouge against, you know, the pro-Vietnamese element. There's no way that, there's no way that American soldiers did not engage the Khmer Rouge in hostile action and theater. But this is the only time of having above board.

I mean, this was like a real firefight, you know, and it's, um, that's, um, you know, like I said, uh, I, I, um, I try to raise the people because, I think as a historical writer, I think it's important to honor the memory of people like these guys who were there. But it's also, it shows you how it shows you how strange the Cold War got really after 69, 70, 71, when it became really like a three-way kind of contest with the United States kind of nominally allied with China in strategic terms. in pursuing the kind of interdependence, the results of which we kind of see today in the globalist structure.

But it was far from some kind of like clean alliance. And, you know, the way, what the Chinese view as kind of sound policy in terms of how to intrigue against others is incredibly weird. You know, like, and I'm telling you, like, creating this

incident for the sake of trying to exploit, you know, the, the ensuing chaos for some kind of political and diplomatic cachet. That might seem crazy to, like, the Western mind. That's exactly the way the Chinese think. If you read about the pointless border war that Mao provoked with Moscow, Mao basically risked a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, said he could go around humiliating Brezhnev

you know, for a few weeks and acting like he'd scored some kind of victory so that domestically like, you know, he could shore up his kind of fledging personality called credibility. And like no, like,

even a totally unhinged Western you know, tyrant, like, wouldn't think that way or wouldn't do that. But that's, that's the kind of stuff characteristic of the regime. And from, I mean, in the lifetime

people like me and yourself. I mean, yeah, the kind of chaos of Mao and the aftermath is something we didn't experience firsthand, but even even dang, it's kind of credited as like this great reformer and this kind of moderating influence.

I mean, the stuff that he would orchestrate in order to, in order to advantage himself or advantage, you know, Peking in his eyes vis-a-vis the West, it doesn't make any sense. So that's kind of the last tragic chapter in the history of what was into China.

There's, I mean, there was, there was the Chinese, there was the, there was the, there was the Sino-Vietnamese border war in 79. And there was, again, too, there was the, there's the occupation of Cambodia, you know, from 79 until until the wall came down. China Chinese and Vietnamese forces fired on each other like four years ago. Yeah, yeah. No, and that's why one of the really interesting things, you know, Obama was one of the last things he did in office was he lifted any remaining restrictions on a military tech transfers to Vietnam. Like the people in the Pentagon who aren't conceptually illiterate, and there's very few of them who aren't. they're literally fucking morons. But they realize that Vietnam's like an essential hedge against the People's Republic.

And it is. And Vietnam's got a real comic capability. I mean, they're hard people. They've got a real military. And Vietnam's comparatively huge country. It's got like 60 million people. You know, like people think it's like Americans. They think all these countries are like the size of Albania or something.

Like Vietnam's in a, as a geopolitic hedge, Yeah, Vietnam's incredibly important. And an alliance, that would make sense. And now that would alleviate some of the pressure of America having to play between Tokyo and Seoul, which is increasingly causing consternation in relations with both countries, as well as their relationship to China.

What would be intelligent would be to cultivate countries like Vietnam, and some kind of like American version of what the Russians are trying to account with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Like Nate, not only is NATO like destabilizing and pointless, but it solves as not how you structure military alliances in the 24th century. It's like structurally obsolescent as well as politically anachronistic. That's kind of a subject to another show. But I hope I didn't, I wouldn't like bore people with just kind of like relaying the Battle of Kotang. Like I said, I. It's fascinating.

Yeah, yeah. And next time what I want to get into, I want to get into President Carter's modernization of the command and control aspect of American strategic nuclear forces. And how, you know, the advent of AI as well as, you know, the onset of strategic parity, where in the window of decision making, you know, was reduced in some cases, you know, to five to eight minutes or something. it had just been accepted for a time that the president would die immediately in event of nuclear war. So strategic air command

would be acting as the article two executive. I mean, that's patently unconstitutional, number one, number two, that's just like ethically that's not right. You don't like the United States Air Force and, you know, strategic air commands that then existed. They don't get to decide, you know, like who lives and who dies. They don't get to decide, you know, when and how we wait.

war but also it raised a fascinating issue i'm always telling people too like guys like harlan ellison you know when they were you know harlan ellison actually came over the idea for skynet and like james cameron like ripped them off like cameron rips off everything but this wasn't just like some kind of horror movie trope um the the removal of human decision makers um from strategic nuclear war fighting that was a real thing and by the 1980s it was becoming and when there's

when when launching even on warning when the window of decision making temporally speaking it becomes so narrow that even launching on warning is too late like what do you do it's like well

you know you defend yourself by finding ways to code variables that indicate you know that indicate imminent assault like before though you know before there's even like conventional like launch indicators and mobilization indicators but then it's like okay but then like when do you attack when there's like a 10% probability of assault when there's like a 50% anything over 50% when there's 90% when there's anything over 1% you know and it's um not you know that that's a kind of like machine thinking that becomes

inevitable you know when technology it becomes totally just positive of outcomes but also uh the amount of data of that has to be managed in a strategic landscape like that, like humans can't do it. You know, so we were looking at a situation where the Cold War endured, like machines would have been the decision maker, you know, and you'd have to hope that, you know, the coded indicators, you know, were correct, or at least, like, couldn't be spoofed, you know, by, by man or by fate but that yeah that's i i'll save it for the when we get into that but that's that's that's that's kind of the that's kind of the key feature the carter presidency i think and i mean i i'm a lot friendlier to carter um and uh you know the way i i view the his epoch and most people so

well we'll get into some of these strategic nuclear command of control issues some of these war tech issues and um and we'll deal with like carter the man himself the next step but episode. And like, again, I really, really appreciate people supporting the series. And I wanted to give Kotang, it's due. And, you know, the men who were there, it's due. Because like I said, it's something nobody really talks about. And that's part of the reason for these series is that we can deep dive into stuff that people don't really talk about and more mainstream sources. So that's all I got. And thank you, people. Yeah, of course. I'm two quick plugs. Yeah. You can find me on Twitter that probably, it'll probably change in the next few weeks. but I'm on there again. You can find me at Rio underscore Thomas 777. I'm recording for my YouTube channel on Friday with my dear friend Kerry, and I'm going to upload that next week sometime,

so I'll make sure to hype it so everybody knows. My YouTube channel, there's nothing near yet, but there will be is Thomas TV. You can find me on Substack, which is kind of a permanent home. It's real Thomas 777.com. I'm gonna relaunch a Telegram channel because everybody who supports us, they really like Telegram. I mean, Telegram really treated me badly,

so I wasn't real keen to doing business with them again. But I will launch a channel for the sake of the subscribers and our friends. But I'm going to do that sometime this weekend, and I'll plug that when we're back on there. But right now I just have like a private channel. But I'm going to relaunch a public channel. book one that's all I got awesome man so the next time thank you Thomas today happens to be the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Paris Peace Accords which ended the Vietnam War and we couldn't

think of anyone better to have on to talk about that than somebody that is gracing me with his presence on my podcast and going through a Cold War series right now so how you don't know I'm doing well. Thank you. Well, I appreciate you inviting me. Here's the first question I wanted to ask, because I was writing questions on the last episode we did, and I realized the episodes were for the end. So did public opinion help in ending the war? I mean, yeah, because the internal situation in any state, any modern state, I mean, whether you're talking about a nominal, you know, multi-prudel. party democracy. I mean, in the terms that that signifier was utilizing the Cold War,

or whether you're talking about, you know, the, the communist states, the Eastern block, in a state, in a general mobilization, especially, but in any, in any, any policy, ongoing policy initiative or structure that directly affects the population, like public opinion is impactful on, on that policy. You know, no, despite the kind of mythology of Democratic peace theory or whatever, there are not states that exist that are just totally at odds to the body politic. Not any government in existence, nor has there been in the modern era that just has absolutely no mandate.

You know, it's completely immune to public opinion. There's not anything to work. But what I was saying a moment ago, and I'm going somewhere with this, it's not just like a single old guy tangent. I'm listening to Michael Savage and he's got Colonel McGregor on. I know that people don't, I know some people on it. McGregor either. That's not the point. Savage kept on talking about the Russians kind of foibles in Ukraine and saying, this is

like Vietnam when, you know, the Pentagon just wouldn't really fight the war. And McGregor to his credit corrected Savage. McGregor's like, look, man, like, Vietnam's a fucking scalp hunt. We killed a huge amount of people in Vietnam. It was not this like pussyfooting around like, hey, we want to be, you know, we got a placate world opinion. We don't want to like kill any Vietnamese. It was I mean, pardon my language, it was a fucking gooked scalp hunt, okay? But you don't win wars just by going out and killing as many people as possible. You don't win wars by, you know, manufacturing dead people.

If you did, I think throughout 942, the Vermeck had something like a 15-to-one burn rate and, like, major engagement with the Red Army. Okay, I mean, does the greater German Reich exist today? Did it win the war? It killed a whole lot of people in Russia? No. But the issue with public opinion was that it wasn't so much, like the court history is two things. It's what Michael Savage said.

It's that, oh, America wasn't really fighting the Vietnam War or was doing brutal things, but, you know, these things were, you know, not, the war was, there wasn't a general mobilization in place. And, you know, America wasn't really applying force the way it should. That's part of the narrative. The other part is, well, the Vietnam War was wrong. So all these people rose up and just forced, you know, evil Mr. Nixon to stop. what he was doing. Like, nothing like that happened. And, you know, 70% of combat infantrymen and NAM were guys who enlisted.

You know, and the remaining 30%, probably, you know, there was some truth of the fact that there was, like, a poverty draft, you know, when the standards were kind of lessened on, you know, who would be, you know, considered. I can't remember what the classification scheme was. but I mean there was some truth to that but this idea that there was either this draft revolt or America just became like a country of peace mix and that ended the war

but what it did do I mean Johnson was in fact lying to the American people and what he was saying was not being any sense and he was getting on TV directly contradicting McNamara on top of that unlike you know the New Dealers war where Roosevelt would literally have you arrested if you were a media guy

who criticized him his policy policy or you engage in defeatism, which constantly with everything from saying maybe the war is not a great idea to reporting on, you know, America actually like losing in the field. I mean, I'm not making this up. Like, this is, comparing the, comparing the view of, or the orientation of the executive branch, you know, in 941 to 45. And from 96, 5 to 73, it's like night and day. you know, like if you think Roosevelt would have tolerated, you know, um, Abby Hoffman,

uh, or some counterpart to like Dudley Pelly, you know, holding a hundred thousand ban protests, waving national socialist flags in Washington, like you're dead fucking wrong. Like, why this was allowed and like, why this kind of nonsense, you know, why,

why, like Cronkite was allowed to be embedded at I-Corps and, uh, at Longbin, when, uh, you know, LF, like Sappers were assaulting it. I mean, that's a whole other issue, but

people didn't realize something was wrong. There was major attrition in Vietnam. Like, young Americans were dying in large numbers, and it was clear that, it was clear that Johnston was lying. Okay? Nixon, who swept the country,

as we've talked about, and Creighton Abrams, who replaced Westmoreland, Nixon was, in fact, winning the war, I believe, in military terms. I mean, the political side of it was totally different. Well, in country, as well as domestically,

in regard to the internal situation in the United States. Nixon did do some foolish things, however. Like, we talked about in our last episode, you know, how Kissinger and Nixon, they kind of wade his personal war on Melvin Laird, the Secretary of Defense, and that's not what you do if you're the president. And then they went to use publicly layered

of, like, leaking the secret bombing of Cambodia, First of all, why you're admitting to that? Because that's terrible PR. Secondly, why are you having this knockdown, dragout fight in public with Melvin Laird? Like, how does that look? Okay, so even people who are enthusiastic about, you know, kind of the policy shift of Nixon, Creight and Abrams, and all of that, they're like, okay, why are all these conspiratorial intrigues happening? What exactly is going on? You know, and then the media really, you know, the, I'm sorry if this seems scattershot,

but I'm trying to present a linear narrative the best I can. You know, the Kent State, maybe a lot of people know this. I don't think they do, though. You know, the Kent State shooting of those students on the National Guard, that was a protest of the assault on Cambodia. Okay, you know, late in the war in 1970, the reason why people freaked out about the assault, and Cambodia is because to them it indicated a wider war. In a sense it was, but Nixon was not lying.

Vietnamization was well underway. There was an active disengagement. The Army of the Republic of Vietnam was taking on the brunt of combat duties. And Cambodia was key, and we'll get into that if you're willing to when we got the time. Nixon really kind of neutralized the strategic game of Warsaw Pact in Vietnam by affecting the Senate of Soviet split, wherein China and their proxy of the Khmer Rouge came to be totally at odds with the Soviet Union and Hanoi, and an active proxy war between communist superpowers developed,

you know, between the Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge. I mean, whether Cameroos were evil or not, I mean, that's another issue. But the point being, there was complexities to widening the war in Cambodia that couldn't really be finessed in PR terms. And the fact, Nixon would have been going on with him, Kiziger and Laird, it seemed rotten. These things kind of conspired to really turn public opinion against what was underway. So, yeah, I mean, I realized I was long-winded and some of a scattershot, but yes, There was a huge impact. It was one part, the anti-war movement, which was in part, I mean, it was a fifth column regardless, but in part it actually was funded and organized by agents of Warsaw Pacted Intelligence Services.

There was a hostile media apparatus. Even those that weren't, even those aspects of national media that weren't hostile, Johnson, who did a lot of incredibly stupid and kind of incomprehensible things, allowing media to truly be embedded in the field, combat elements in a war like Vietnam, with free fire zones, I mean, that's literally insane. You know, it was inevitable even if something like Mila hadn't broken, at some point, some newsmen would have had raw footage of GIs like wasting like women and kids. I'm not saying as American troops are evil or something at all. I'm saying like that's what happens in a free fire zone, okay? and in good wars like World War I and two, that happened also.

But in Vietnam, going to the peculiar nuances of the strategic environment, that kind of thing happened in alarming earnest, if that makes any sense. But point being, yeah, so some of this was self-sabotaged, some of this was kind of like the peculiar, some of it was people not really understanding. I mean, TV was still new then, basically. I mean, part of it was, you know, especially Johnson, you know, who was a guy who was like born in the early 20th century, like not really understanding things. Part of it was Johnson was fucking insane. Part of it was, you know, the, you had a, you know, you had a domestic situation that had been actively subverted, which was literally the opposite of, you know, the situation the new dealers confronted, you know, when they mobilized for war.

I mean, it was, on top of that, too, I mean, there was, there was incredibly dangerous things afoot. You know, 62 was the Cuba crisis. 73 was the next major crisis in the Middle East, which I think in some ways was more dangerous than able archery three. Okay, but in the interim, you know, you had, there was 5,000 Soviet military personnel on the ground in North Vietnam, you know, intelligence types. you know, some of these guys are training the North Vietnamese on Sam missiles and things. But there's the constant fear, you know, during these operations like linebacker,

are we going to kill a bunch of Russians? And then, you know, are we going to, is what the fuck's the Kremlin going to do then? Maybe nothing or maybe they're going to treat it as an act of war. This is, like, incredibly dangerous stuff. And there's the ongoing, you know, issue in Europe where, you know, you had, you know, you had, you know, you literally had 300,000 U.S. troops,

nose and those with the Red Army, the Foley Gap, and then the Northern Plain, I mean, and say nothing of, you know, occupied Berlin. Like, people don't realize, I mean, people don't realize how, I mean, you remember because you're old enough, and I do, I mean, I didn't live through Vietnam, but, you know, I do remember vividly the early 80s and being afraid of, of nuclear war.

I mean, people don't realize like how tense things were. And in a daily capacity, you know, that was strewn with people's lives. And even people who basically were patriotic, according to the terms of, you know, the era, and even people who weren't particularly anti-government, there was a certain, like, weirdness of the Cold War sinking in. It's like, okay, like, you know, even people who didn't have, you know, teenage kids, at least some kid on their blog had gotten blown away Yanom or some relative of theirs. you know, they got this constant fear of, like, nuclear attack. You know, the economy was going to shit.

Like, despite with people like Oliver Stone tell you, like, Vietnam didn't, like, make everybody rich. Like, yeah, there's always war profiteers and Zelensky types. Like, there were 500 years ago, there were 5,000 years ago, there were in 968 or today. Yeah, there were guys who were profiting from the Vietnam War. But the Vietnam War was killing the American economy. You know, I mean, like, it was, these were not, like, good times, okay?

that's one of the America didn't really write itself until Reagan's second term, honestly. I mean, there's other contributing factors, you know, like the energy crisis and the need to restructure like certain aspects of America's consumption,

energy consumption in order to account from the realities. But it literally took like a decade and a half for like America to like unfuck itself from Vietnam, like in terms of you know, the national economic profile. But, I mean, it was all of those things. The big, the big issue with the Paris peace agreements is people... Well, let me just say.

You're talking about the economy, and they were almost literally doing two wars. Because not only are they paying for Vietnam, but now they have this war on poverty, that they're having to print money over and so you of course you're going things are going to go to shit because when you're also throwing millions of

social program come in you're also throwing millions upon millions of dollars to develop you know ICBM systems that you know can be super hardened to withstand like first strike you know like you know keep keeping B52s constantly in the air like with nuclear payloads keeping 300,000 men in West Germany,

you know, keeping, you know, developing and maintaining, like, a fleet of Minutemen missiles as, you know, as the primary deterrent, you know, keeping nuclear-capable submarines in the water. Like, this is unbelievably expensive. You know, like, one of the reasons why, like, Reagan went all into when the Cold War,

it wasn't just because, you know, he, you know, he had, like, balls or something, or because he, you know, he, you know, he wasn't like a pussy like Carter or whatever, like, dumb things people think today. And, like, America could wage the color longer than Ivan, but America was running out of money to fucking do it, too. You know, you cannot sustain that indefinitely. You're either going to go to war or you're going to face some kind of structural crisis like the Soviets did, and then the odds of war happening becomes exponentially more likely. I mean, you know, this idea is somehow like, America,

could have like it definitely, you know, maintains, like, a 600-ship Navy, you know, could have continuously, like, fielded, like, you know, newer and newer weapons, you know, like the B-2 platform and, you know, and, you know, and, and, and pursue, you know, SDI, which would have become necessary. I know people, it's like to talk about it's like, something of pipe dream, you know, people like, you know, Mr. Ted Kennedy and the epoch, but it wasn't. like Jerry Pornel said, like, orbital space, had the Cold War endured the 1990s, like orbital space had to become what naval warfare platforms were to strategic nuclear planning in the 80s. I mean, at some point the money would have run out. You know, like, again, they can't...

Well, that's also... That's also why President Nixon ended Bretton Woods. I mean, it makes it easier if you get off the gold standard and you can, you know, accelerate the money supply, too. Yeah, very much so. But it's also, too, he was genuinely worried. He was genuinely worried about, about, like, a run on the gold reserves. I mean, it was just like a real, that was a real prospect,

especially because it's like outside the scope, and we can talk about this in another episode, and I'm not an economist, but I do know, I am something of an economic historian, and that I, I have, like, a basic conceptual picture, of how the structure of American economic policy changed and just like how globalism kind of gradually

became a reality, you know, and how the kind of information age, you know, changed the way financial markets function where the overmeats the road. And aside of all these things, you and I just raised, the 1970s, that was the dawn of, those that you're dawned to the information age, okay?

I mean, you could say that like the kind of machines, that, like, touring machines were, I don't mean like that. I mean like the digital age, I guess I should say, that the dawn of that was the 1970s. And things, from the 1970s to now, things changed rapidly.

You know, and that was ultimately the way business has done and the way like money is conceptualized, in my opinion, for better and for worse. I mean, it was, it was not all negative,

although there are any negatives. But, you know, these kinds of punctuated, um, these kinds of punctuated, changes are they they're their stresses you know like i they they they um they uh they they they cause they they make they make crises more probable of all sorts so yeah it uh you know but the um

the main uh what i kind of wanted to emphasize on um you know i mean like all things related to vietnam even today even though kind of the like the taboo is no longer around the vietnam war, obviously, as it was for, you know, when I was a kid, like when you were a teenager, I'm sure. But people, it's still, like, ill understood. So this is the idea of the Paris peace talks, like, guys in kind of the mainstream right, even some guys, like, on the dissident right, they do it as like, oh, well, Congress screwed Nixon over and just, you know, cut off the money supply and, you know, the tangible military aid to the

Republic of Vietnam, you know, so the South couldn't defend itself. and, you know, Hanoi was just rubbing its hands together and never meant to, like, abide the rules of the, or the, the material, express conditions of the peace agreement. It's not really true. You know, and then there's, like, other people who, you know, people on the left and kind of, like, major historians, they just claim that, like, well, Nixon was just making, you know, make a fool the American people and, like, pretending to accomplish peace. That's not true either. this was kind of a if you the view from

Nixon and Kissinger and uh and across the aisle you know, Jop and and the Hanoy leadership like the central committee, the Communist Party of Vietnam,

there's like a lack of shared premises real large. And if you read the statements, uh, what Hanoy was saying to Cosvin, Cosvin COSVN, that's an acronym. It's central offices south

Vietnam. There was the anglicized acronym for what amounts the Central Committee of the Viet Cong, based in South Vietnam. And what they communicated to them was that, in their view, what the ceasefire meant, what the peace agreement meant was that America would disengage that communists in South Vietnam, like formal party members, Vieton, suspects, you know, sympathizes as all in sundry, would no longer be treated as enemy combatants. A roadmap

would be implemented, as it were, for what was supposed to be implemented in 1954, you know, which was eventually, you know, like countrywide elections, which never actually happened, in part because of the constantly, you know, the constantly changing regime in Saigon

never allowed to happen. Like, that is true. And they wouldn't allow it to happen because Vietnam would have gone red. I understand that completely. But the two regime in Saigon, immediately after, like, the ink was dry, basically, like, a major push happened in key areas, especially border territories, like, with Cambodia, as well as the Quang Trade province. You know, key operational areas of communist control. that were like strategically essential for them to be able to bargain from a position of strength and in advent of hostilities accessed logistically what they needed to in Cambodia.

And when it became clear that the South was going to continue to, you know, trying to annihilate what remained of the Viet Cong, the North responded with conventional means. and their reasoning was always South Vietnam is not a sovereign country there are not two Vietnam's the North never accepted that so their notion was well kind of like the provisional IRA

and you can say this is in bad faith their view was always you know we're gonna lay out our arms but you've basically got to like allow like you know full representation of the Communist Party and you know you've got to give our people

equality of status at the polls. And, you know, added to that too, obviously, there's an epistemological problem with communism because they claim that they're practicing a kind of science. And if you refuse to abide, what they claim is the inevitable science of history, you know, which is like advancing socialism. You know, you're basically engaged in some kind of oppression of humanity in general.

Like, quite literally, this is like what, they'd say. You know, whether you're talking about East Berlin, whether you're talking about Moscow, whether you're talking about Prague, where you're talking about Vietnam. So there's like added, it's kind of like this added, like, inability to come to terms that, like, framed, like, uh, Hanoy's conceptual horizon. However, um, Nixon basically put Saigon on as good as stead as it could have been in terms of political legitimacy and in terms of bolstering their case in the court of world opinion, which actually mattered then in a way it didn't, it doesn't now.

And the 972 offensive, colloquially called the Easterative by like, you know, military geeks and, like, historians all in sundry. That was stopped in its tracks. I mean, American air power devastated North Vietnamese armed columns, but the Army of the Republic of Vietnam actually stood and fought. and like I think I made the point some weeks back that they get a bad rap you know because they're always kind of panned as like this cowardly forest with like crooks and like anyway full mil jag at the only time he's the arvin on screen and some arvin captain and he's wearing like some faggity like fucking silk scarf and he's literally pimping some girl to the marines like hey you want you want boom boom and like and that like you literally never see a portrayal of them as like anything but like scumbed eggs or like pooties and like That's not fair. I mean, I'm not a Vietnam veteran.

So, like, I'm sure those guys had their own acts to grind with them people. But I'm talking about historical record, just like as a dude who, like, writes about historical topics. There's nothing else of the 72 offensive and the fact that it would stop and its tracks, like, acquits the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. Okay, that's not all air power. Okay. So, yeah, there's that. But that's kind of the way to understand the Paris Peace Agreement.

It wasn't just Kissinger being duplicitous or Nixon, you know, being a snake. I mean, what would Nixon gain from that anyway? Like, because if anyone knows anything about Nixon knows. Like, Nixon's a guy who, like, he's a rare American who lived historically in absolute terms. Like, all Nixon never thought about was his, like, contribution to history. Like, Nixon never, ever, ever would have just, like, you know, pulled some kind of ruse and said, like, to hell with Thighon, I don't care. You know, this, I'm just going to, you know, this is how. I'm going to try and shore up my cred

in the midst of Watergate, like this nonsense. But it's also, you know, the Sino-Soviet split, Nixon, if you read what Nixon wrote after the war, and post-Watergate, Nixon disappeared for about five years. But then he made a comeback as a best-selling author,

and as the Cold War heated up again, you know, people became very thirsty for serious analysis. on geo-strategic things. And Nixon really had the Soviet Union's number in a way of remarkable. And he wrote a lot about why he went to China. And he said, like, look, you know, I basically realized in 1953, you know, as the stalemate Korea set in, like, we had to decouple Beijing from Moscow at all costs.

I mean, yeah, we have to make compromises there. Like, yeah, you know, a lot of people would. suffer in places like Cambodia because of that. You know, you can say it's callous, but Nixon was totally open about that. But had that not happened, the communists would have won the Cold War, absolutely. You know, you'd have a

communist world in America, it'd be this kind of garrison state that existed, you know, and had an ability to project power kind of like in 19th century terms, like, you know, throughout like the Western Hemisphere. year probably as far as Greenland or something. But it would, you know,

it would basically be this kind of like an island amiss, like a hostile like Red World. Okay. And that was a very real possibility. Had things not developed what they did. But in the more immediate capacity, Nixon realized he had to court now when he did because that neutralized that neutralized

the strategic advantage of Soviet victory by proxy in Vietnam. because you literally had a communist super state on the border of like, you know, their client in Vietnam. And the Khmer Rouge would stand with China no matter what. You know, it didn't matter that, you know, they'd, it didn't matter that they'd clicked up with the Soviets and the Chinese and the National Liberation Front and Hanoi to fight the Americans. When things, the Khmer never liked the Vietnamese anyway, and when things when, when things were in, bad between Hanoi or between Moscow and Beijing,

the Khmer Rouge would always be all in with with China and its will, okay? So you had Nixon managed, you know, what did the Soviets really gain in Vietnam? I was like, okay, yeah, like we talked about, Vietnam was, that was where, that was,

that was where the line in the sand was drawn, you know, when when the free world, as it was called, you know, like fought, you know, the communists in open combat. It didn't matter. It could have been anywhere, but that's just where it was. It was a political fight.

It wasn't a struggle for resources and territory. And yeah, the Congress won that, but it's like, okay. So, now, you know, the Soviets had basically, like, this kind of, they've got, they've got this, they've got this appendage

beleaguered by, you know, hostile Cameroos, Cambodia, and, like, hostile, you know, know communist China towards north and that is really interesting too because obviously this at that time

the trifecta that truly ruled the Soviet Union in my opinion was Usenov and drop off and Grameko and um you know the Soviet's hedge against China was India you know

that's in like true military and independence of between Moscow and India and that's when Kissinger went all in with Pakistan. You know, in the Indo-Pakistan was very much a Cold War proxy resultant directly from

the writing on the wall that Soviet's detected from what was happening with Nixon and China. And then when that, I mean, that was all incredibly brutally, and then the Soviets pushed in Angola, like immediately after, that's why the focus shifted to Africa.

As it's like, Africa, we can win. You know, like, what's the West have? you know, they've got Rugeez, they've got Ruggians going down. They got South Africa as a pariah. You know, and plus, like, they wanted to fight the South Africans, you know,

and then 50,000 Cubans showed up to fight the SADF. You know, and it was, hey, we're, you know, look at this racist oppressor state, you know, like we're, you know, the Warsaw Pact, you know, believes in liberating people, you know, in the global south. Or the colored world, take your pick.

With that, I mean, all these things are just, these things are just incidentally. was approximately caused by Vietnam. It's approximately caused by the fact that Nixon and Kissinger were able to decouple Peking from Moscow, like in absolute terms. You know, I mean, I, you know, and to the point that that rift could never be repaired. I mean, that's remarkable.

There would have been, I mean, along to the vagaries of Mao, and I think just things are intrinsic to the Chinese national and cultural character, as well as just kind of racial differences and geostrategic issues. I think the Sino-Soviet alliance would have been problematic going forward, but it definitely would have held together until at least, you know, America slash NATO was, like, vanquished within, you know, the Eurasian landmass. And the Soviets and the Cheycons would have handled their answers later. It owes entirely to Nixon and Kissinger that the Senate of Soviet split was that fractures and that permanent.

I firmly believe that. If that was like two kind of like widely off topic, and wanted to focus more specifically and concretely in the piece of them, sorry, but I thought it was important to make notes. Well, here's one thing I wanted to bring up about the, Accords. Yeah. Most, I would say a lot of mainstream historians would say that South Vietnam was basically

pressured into accepting an agreement that basically ensured that it was going to collapse. I mean, I think there's a political problem here. Like, we're used to, we're not in a wrong way to characterize it. We're accustomed to the Department of State, just going to issuing these ridiculous statements that nobody could possibly derive anything from but like gross offense. I mean, in terms of like, you know, the foreign regimes are directed at. Like in the case of Vietnam, it was a very delicate minuet. I mean, first of all, I mean, like I said, at the office of this discussion, you know, we killed a huge amount of people in North Vietnam, I mean,

and the South, but particularly, I mean, we, these were not people had warm feelings towards America you know I mean this was a brutal war with racial overtones frankly okay secondly like I said this wasn't clear cut

I mean arguably it's always ambiguous if you're talking about national frontiers and you know like I know people talk like you know the borders of Ukraine are like absolutely sacred you know and like more holy than you know like some some prom queen's virginity or something or that like

you know, the state of Poland is a sacred thing. I mean, but aside from like the garbage of that, um, the, the status of Vietnam actually was genuinely ambiguous, you know, and the succession of governments, America really kind of mishandled that.

You know, it's like, okay, I mean, you know, you had a guy like DM who straight, you know, who straight up whacked because it was pretty clear he was just going to go all in and say like, hey, look, I'll allow like a national election. you know, basically, and I think him being in the kind of hustler that he was was looking to carve out some kind of space in the regime, you know, for him and those like himself, you know, but he, obviously, you know, America wasn't going to tolerate that, but, you know, their successors, you know, he had a guy like two who was sort of completely a hard line on the communists, but that wasn't reasonable either, you know, and on. They had to come to term somehow, and I believe Nixon's reasoning was, you know, just strictly like in theater in terms of the military situation and how it impacted the delicate politics. As I said, if there'd been a normal political situation in America, and if you'd had, you know, if there hadn't been like quite literally a coup against Nixon, if you hadn't had a Congress that, you know, full of people who were essentially campaigning on, you know, building a career on, you know,

condemning the, the purported evil of Vietnam War. Had the Truman Doctrine been abided as intended. I think South Vietnam could have basically held off a Northern assault indefinitely. And as perverse as the logic that Biden count was, particularly as realized, you know, North Vietnam had been at war for decades. And they, speaking of the burn rate, they were losing a huge amount of military-age males. I mean, at some point, the normandy means would not have been able to sustain that. You know, at some point, unless you're talking about some crazy situation,

like the FARC in Cambodia, where you're literally talking about dudes like living in the jungle, not metaphorically, literally, you know, who are like running cocaine and dope and, you know, carrying on some alleged insurgency for 50 years, which probably is more than anything. anything, just kind of like a cover for their little, like, narco trade and their bizarre kind of, you know, anarcho-primitivist existence. Like, you can't just carry on, you know, a revolutionary campaign for decades on decades. And we're not talking about a low-intensity campaign like the PIRA in Belfast. I mean, even that is difficult, but, you know, we're talking about, you know, the North Vietnamese army was actually a crack army. And we're talking about combined arms assaults, you know, where mass numbers of men are dying.

you know, where, you know, you're assaulting with, you're assaulting with columns of T-54 tanks. They have to be fueled. You know, they're being, they're getting close air support from MIG-17s that, you know, with pilots, they have to be trained extensively, and when they die, it's hard to replace them. You know, you're periodically, you know,

your capital city is periodically getting, like, bombed into the fucking Stone Age. You know, I mean, like, does take its toll at one time. You know what I mean? And it, I don't,

the Vietnamese initially thought it would probably take them until about 1979, 1990 to win the war, like Hanoi, I mean. And there is interesting talk because obviously, anyone who spoke in the,

on the Central Committee, like picked their language carefully, you know, as people do in government, but particularly governments at war and especially, you know, the communist regimes, the Cold War.

You could tell these guys, were nervous, like military and civilian alike. Like, look, basically beyond 1980, all bets are off. Like, translated and really, in the lines, like, we can't sustain this indefinitely. You know, so there is that. But what I think I did want to raise, I made the point that, in my opinion, and I'm not a criminologist, I don't speak Russian, but I do know something about the Soviet Union. and I believe firmly that the Soviet Union was at zenith when the shadow executive was the trifect of Usenov, Grimiko, and Dropoff.

And Dropoff really, really had the United States as a number, okay? And he under, in a way that most Russians don't, and the way, frankly, most Eastern bloc types didn't. And that's one of the reasons why he was so effective. and he very much understood that if you can really, really fuck with, you know, the internal situation of America and carve out a genuine, like, single issue opposition on a matter of war and peace, you can really, really foobar their system. You know, that's kind of like America's weak point. Just like solidarity was like the weak point of these iron curtain regimes. And like in similar, you know, similarly structured. things, you know, solidarity, of course, was, uh, it was like, it was basically a Catholic

social teaching movement that was at base, you know, like, uh, a labor union, you know, that was demanding what the party was, was always promising, but never delivering on. And that was like kryptonite to the, you know, Mars's Leninist cadres that ruled. You know, um, it, uh, so, yeah, there was, it's kind of a perfect storm of things that made you know made the situation untenable vis-a-vis South Vietnam

but I also I mean and again I want to widen the discussion just a bit I got to make the point again again because people I act with Vietnam's weird anomaly

or this like unique and remarkable evil you know like we talked about the reason I raised this with CETO you know S-EATO Southeast Asia Treaty Organization the 1954 dual accords

of Korea and Indochina and the Truman Doctrine like this was entirely congruous with U.S. policy after the Second World War. Like the cost of waiting the Second World War among other things was

when these primitive as hell third world nations, which are those they truly were primitive, like people living in huts, when they come under assault by Ivan, you go defend them and your kids go defend them and your tax dollars go defend them and you lose those things.

I mean, this was very well understood. You know, that was the Cold War. That came to an end, in part because Washington realized it wasn't tenable. Part of it was the Revolution in Military Affairs. But part of it was just, it took 30 years for the damage brought by World War II to be repaired and for these states like Korea to be built into like functional client states with a comic capability their own.

I mean, that's, you know, I don't really see what America could have done. Within the, I'm not, I don't think World War II had been fought, obviously, but within about irrationality, if I'm, if I'm Kennedy, or if I'm McNamara, or if I'm Nixon in February 69,

you know the office, like, what am I for doing in Saudi States? I say, okay, the Truman Doctrine's off, the Cold War's off, We're not going to defend Vietnam. We're not going to create commitments. You know, we may not even defend West Berlin. I don't know because war is bad and just people don't like it and it's messy and people die.

I mean, like, what do you have other people think should have been done? You know, I mean, that's arguably, that's why it was incredibly, aside of the fact, don't genocide your own civilization, it was incredibly stupid to wage World War II because this was the result. You know, I mean, okay, well, now you get, now, now you get to fight ISIS, for the rest of the planet. I mean, you know,

and that's what happened. So this, um, I was like, nobody really explained to me. It's like, it was good to incinerate, you know,

it was good to incinerate, you know, 150,000 people at Dresden, but the most evil thing ever was, other than, you know, the quote of Holocaust was like blowing away,

like Vietnamese villagers at Mili. I'm not trying to be flipping, because that's, that's fucking horrible. Okay, like, both of those things are horrible. But nobody can tell me, like why the latter is like, you know,

the day America lost its innocence, but the forum was just like something that like had to be done. You know, like it doesn't there's a lot of dishonesty about Vietnam. You know, it's kind of like, it's kind of like the dishonesty of World War II in reverse. You know, like and this is faded because

it's a fatal memory, but I mean, you remember because you're a little just a little more than me. Like, Vietnam was presented as like the worst war ever waged for like reasons no one could articulate. You know, like why. Yeah, and the whole thing was very,

was very, very cynical and ideologically driven, but yeah. Well, is that because everything after Nuremberg has to have a moral component to it? If you apply to a moral component to anything, then if you start with morality, it's a good war, it's a bad war, then you can, I mean,

you're basically, pulling at the heartstrings of middle America of Protestant America, church going America, and you don't leave them around like a dog. Of course, but my point is it was arbitrary. You know, and it's like the, like it was, I realized why people were doing this

and I realized why this fifth column developed the way it did and why they focused on Vietnam, but in absolute terms, like this doesn't make any sense. You know, and like I said, Vietnam's exceptionalized. Like people, you know, the narrative presented by, you know, people like Ron Kovic, people like Oliver Stone, you know, people in the era like Abby Hoffman, was that this is like kind of conspiratorial design. It's like, look, man, like the Truman Doctrine was very clear. Like America deployed in pretty much exactly the same way in Korea and the Dominican Republic in 65. In Bolivia, a run down Che Guevara, up, decades later in Nicaragua and El Salvador, although obviously, and those weren't, you know, those weren't deep deployments.

Like, is it not, like, America abiding the Truman Doctrine and, you know, realizing it had to fight a Soviet client regime to maintain credibility, amidst, as the era of strategic parity was imminent, like, it's not some, like, weird thing. You're, like, hard to, like, difficult to decipher. Like, I, you know, and again, like, nobody can explain to me why, like, why like annihilating Europe and sacrificing your son

is like on Guadalcanal is like awesome but you know like losing your son at Ayadran or Ksan is like this grave evil like when America lost its innocence like it's just it's just stupid and you know it's and it's beyond

stupid it's you know well it turned well they just said that it it just really became a a trope that this wasn't the war to fight, that there was nothing good about this war. 68, you know, even Kronkite is saying that the war can't be won.

Well, yeah, and again, too, like, imagine... I mean, there are... But think about this, like, imagine in 1943, imagine after, you know, the U.S. Army didn't meet the Vermeckton combat until 43, and they got their asses kicked, the Cassarine Pass. Like, imagine if Walter Winscholl had gone on the radio, video and said, Mr. Roosevelt's a liar. World War II can't be won. You know, victory of the axis is imminent. Like, dude would have been arrested if not disappeared. It's a joke. Well, you can't

make this up. You know, like people acting just some like normal occurrence or just like sound journalism. And again, I mean, Americans are this weird idea. Like I said, the two are kind of most puzzling miss to me because it's otherwise intelligent people, you know, who present this these things I'm about to raise you know it's not just like dumb people repeating moral tropes they've heard it's like the guys to say what Michael Savage did I mean Savage isn't smart

but their art's smart going to say it's like oh America was like just pussy footing around in Vietnam and we killed him like three million people and it was literally like a fucking scalp hunt you know again I'm not to say that but shade on the Vietnam Army I've got a lot of respect for them guys and um

I but I mean look man it's real like we killed a fucking huge amount of those people and we were being like we were being like we were doing like cowboy shit around it's you know like so it's like don't pretend that like you know don't pretend like killing millions of these fucking people with like

firepower that was purpose to fight the Soviet Union like it was like some like low key thing that was like not real war but also the um like when people claim like well Vietnam was just like a stupid war it's like look I mean like I said it even part way

with Mirzsham run this you know like you don't you know, you don't fight, you didn't fight wars in 1968, you know, to, like, have access to, like, more, like, grain reserves, you know, or, like, you know, control the ability to, like, you know, ship, like, silk out of, out of, out of the fucking, you know, out of China back to Europe or something. You know, like, it didn't matter where Vietnam was. You know, that's where the line to say it was drawn, that's where the Reds pushed, you know, and if you're going to win the Cold War, like, wherever the Reds pushed, it might be believed. It might be Iran. It might be Vietnam. It might be Angola. Like, it might be West Berlin. Like, that's where you fight them. You know, like, the issue is, like, who's going to, you know, the color was fought in every, in every aspect of conceptual, political life. You know, like economically, like culturally, like technologically and militarily. You know, you can't pick and choose, like, where you fight.

You know, and that's, plus, like, war is like a, like, we talk about war rhymes like. the seasons. I mean, that's the problem with Klausowitz's victims, like, take into kind of this sort of, like, logical extreme. It becomes like irrational. Like, you know, like, you don't just, like, go to war to, like, affect, like,

policy ambitions by other means. You know, like, war arrives, like, the seasons. And there's a bout irrationality to warfare, absolutely. And warfers is a rational process the way that's fought. But, like, you don't just go to war because it's, like, I, you know, I can't, I don't like the, I don't like the trade aramins

not have a country why. I know, I'm going to launch a massive assault on them. Like, that's not how things work. And that'd be like said, like, I want to sell you my house. Maybe if I go to your house and, like, beat the shit out of you, like, that'll help me, like, get a better deal. I mean, it's like not, that's not what people think. You know, like, that's not like things are done. You know, like, and it's not, I realize that sounds silly, but, you know, the, you know, this is a very important point. And that's one of the things, that's one of those that raised Sorrell, it's not just because, I mean, like, his ideas on aesthetics and things and the way, like, people view, like, labor and the way, um, identitarian things in, in political life. I mean, he deals with those things in intelligent ways that's giving it to people like us. But it's, like, ontological view of, like, conflict. Like, this is something that happens. Like, it's not just a rational thing. It arrives. Like, it's, like, why you find, like, a girl attractive. It's like, why, it's like, why, um, it's like why certain symbols.

like take root like during cultural epochs. It's like it's like why winter comes. We're at war now. You know, war arrives. I mean, that I realize I was a bit far afield. Yeah, I think that's important. I mean, and that doesn't regard to Vietnam, but in the case of Vietnam, it's particularly kind of like neglected. You know, yeah. But go out. I'm sorry.

Oh, no problem. Well, we're coming up on the hour. So let me end with this because I know you can probably go on a little bit about this. The common trope, even till today. is that the United States lost the Vietnam War. What is your opinion? When you hear somebody say that, what thoughts come into your mind? I mean, I agree with John Paul Van.

For those that don't know, Van was a really interesting guy and a really troubled guy. He had kind of like a horrible upbringing. Like his mom was literally like an alcoholic prostitute, like didn't know his father, joins the Army Air Corps, his train as a pilot, World War II ends before he sees action. When the Air Force made an independent service, he wanted to stay in the Army,

so he became an infantry officer. Long story short, he commanded a company and then a Ranger battalion in Korea, David Hackworth, a young David Hagg was under his command, and Van became his whole bad. ass, okay? He had problems with alcohol. He got into such shit with an underage girl.

I mean, typical, like, warrior type, who was his own worst enemy, but like a really brilliant soldier. And when he left the service, he was one of the, before his last kind of role in uniform, he was one of the first guys deployed the Mac of V, military assistance command Vietnam in 1962. And the reasoning there, what we talked about, was very, very, you know, he was. a special forces war, counterinsurgency, direct action,

identifying cadres, and eliminating them. Okay? 64, after two years at MacV, Colonel Van retires, he becomes this independent

like defense consultant. Now, lo and behold, a year later, this, like, massive buildup happens, and Van is like, what the hell are you doing? And Van, Van, some of these friends in the Pentagon, so he was able to get back to Vietnam as a civilian, and he ultimately died in 1972,

and in a chopper crash. Van wrote a book on a bright, shining lie, and this kind of put the Vietnam War in perspective for me in terms, and I was a kid, and I highly recommend it to anybody. Van said basically, what I said at the outset of this discussion, I was basically borrowing from Van. Like, look, you don't like win wars, war is not a kind of to see how many people

you can kill. You know, you don't like win a war by like ranking up the biggest body counts or by winning all the battles. You know, you win wars by by annihilating the enemy's ability to fight you know, by destroying his infrastructure and his, you know,

and his ability to reconstitute and continue to wage war and by breaking his political will to wage war in any number of ways. And some constellation of those things like wins the war. so no, America lost the Vietnam War but Americans look at this like a football game or something like hey, we killed more of those people

like okay great man like again the Vermacht killed something like their burn ratio was something like 15 to 1 I'm not exaggerating okay I mean does that mean like the German Reich won World War II because they killed 20 million Russians

I mean it uh you know and it's not it's not a football game like saying like hey at Iaa drank like we kicked more Fiannob's ass. They didn't really win, or like whatever Westmoreland's Coke was. And, you know, um,

the, uh, and Vand was absolutely right. The problem with America is that it upset the firepower. That's something that America borrowed from the German general staff of old, but with kind of, without the kind of, uh,

tactical flexibility and intelligence of the German general staff. It's like the American notion is that firepower solves all problems. it doesn't matter what it is. If you throw in a firepower at it's going to be defeated. Nothing can stand up to a American combined arms. That's not true. I mean, yeah, I guess there's no, if you threw it a firepower in Vietnam, you would continue to kill huge numbers of people.

You could probably turn it into like a non-functional country. I mean, especially you had one resorted to nuclear and biological weapons. But that's not, you don't wage war to just annihilate countries. you know that's why the carthaginian piece has become like this mythological thing i mean i assume i'm not in general but i do know something so no i mean america america lost the vietnam war because it it was um i mean again too it's like what's your victory metric i mean like the minute the minute uh the minute those guys those little yellow guys with red stars on their pith

helmets were running into Saigon with their clashton they looked too big for them and these guys were running and they were double-timing these guys they've been war I wore for 30 years think about that I mean that that's when that's when Hanoi won that war

okay I mean it so the the um you know I I look at that and if you look at man when I see that because again it's like some pride thing or something like I'm making fun of their favorite football team or something. You know, and like I said, I've got, I've got all, I've got huge respect for the Vietnam Army.

You know, that's like my dad's generation. But they're, like, fascinating guys. And, like, that's when the U.S. Army was, like, at its best. And plus, it was just, like, cool. You had, like, that was the only time, like, you had, like, weird old in the Army, too. You had, like, weird, like, long-haired guys and, like, weird rednecky guys. And, like, crazy-ass. Like, dude, like, huge afro is, like, like, fuck.

I'm like being silly, but like not, you know, I'm like, I really play about a trope. But I'm the last person who's going to, like, say anything nasty about, like, the Vietnam Army. Like, those guys are, like, the best. They were, like, legit, like, was cool about America, like, legit, you know. But going around saying, and it wasn't, I mean, it wasn't their fault. Like, they, those guys, those guys fought splendidly. Like, they performed very, very well. But, no, America absolutely did not when to be in that war.

No. All right. Well, let's end it there. Thomas, please give your plugs. And, uh, yep. Yeah, man. Um, you can find me on Substack, which is kind of like my permanent home. It's real Thomas 777.7.7.com.

I back on Twitter again, but I get, I get fucking nude from there, like, all the time. But, I mean, if you look for me, like, you'll find me there. But it's, don't be, like, sad if, like, you look for me and I'm gone. I literally get banned from there, like, every, like several weeks. I'm at Real Capital R-E-A-L

underscore Thomas 777 on Twitter. I am watching my YouTube channel, man. And I talk to my long-suffering editor and like production guy

and he's ready to go. So this weekend, I've got to record more with Mr. Pete here and I've got to record for my own pod. And I've got to record with a couple

dear friends of mine for the channel content that's going to go to my editor and then it's going to launch. So, you can find my channel at Thomas TV on YouTube. I'll

I link it on my substack and I link it on my Twitter if you can't find it, but there's nothing there yet, but there will be in like a week. Yeah, like literally in a week. Like right around the first week, right on the first week in the,

during the first week in February. But that's what I got. Oh, My second book in my Steelstorm series just drop. You should get that at Imperium Press. It's Imperiumpress.org. The book is Steelstorm 2. It's the second one of five.

It's Frank Herbert-style science fiction. And I think I've gotten overwhelmingly positive feedback on it. I wouldn't keep writing them. So, yeah, and thank you for that, everybody. I really, really, really am honored by that. But, yeah, that's all I got, man.