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Guest: Andrew Cockburn, Washington DC editor, Harpers magazine 

Recorded: July 24, 2019

The theme of this episode is Pentagon weapons procurements sleaze — the disconnect between alleged defense needs vs actual weapons purchases, from the Reagan Era through today. First, we talk to Andrew Cockburn about his recent article "The Military-Industrial Virus" . . . Then, the War Nerd's alter-ego John Dolan recalls how he wasted his post-hippie youth consuming weapons magazines like Aviation Week & Space Technology in dark library basements, and the slow-mo epiphanies that came out of these lost decades, shaping his insights as Gary Brecher . . . 

* The Sgt. York M247:

Read Andrew Cockburn's article "The Military-Industrial Virus: How bloated defense budgets gut our armed forces" in Harpers. Buy Andrew's books. Follow Andrew on Twitter.

And don't forget the new audiobook by the War Nerd's alter-ego John Dolan: "Pleasant Hell", the comic memoir read by the author himself. Buy it here! 

Total time: 1:55:34

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here 

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Comments

Dingus

Link doesn't seem to be live.

Paul Vd

Great guest. Pierre Sprey would also be a good guest to talk about this and the F-35. He pulls no punches.

MS

Anyone recal this wonderful fillm called "The Pentagon Wars" which addressed those issue you mentioned? Here's a taster https://youtu.be/aXQ2lO3ieBA

Christopher loew

Sorry not used to this messenger. My take on the logic of empire. In the 19th century Brits wanted a military as big as the next two largest. These days America wants one twice as big as the next two largest.

THEKILLERWHALE

Man, how great was that French Bastille Day presentation of the floating target on a platform with a machine gun? The sheer impracticality of it as a weapon of war in the age of drones was staggering. But they still gave the guy a freakin' machine gun! Hilarious!

Simon

I'd like to know this very thing. Wrote a more lengthy intro of Dmitry Orlov some minutes ago which now seems to have disappeared. i hope Ames and Dolan have him on soon as his work has dealt much with the similarities/contrasts between USSR and USSA.

Mark Ames

still having problem?

Dingus

Nope. All fixed. Thanks!

Jason Thompson

No more useless weapon than the blade?? No wonder you managed to avoid Dungeons & Dragons in your nerdy youth XD (and even more thankfully, you also avoided Yukio Mishima-style sword-fixated fascism)

Noneya bezznes

As an army wife to an enlisted solider for almost 15 years I rail about this very topic to all our neighbors. I'm fun at parties.

Aditya V

Great vignettes throughout episode

zaabittimov

Oh man, I put in so many hours into the encyclopedic memorization of aviation hardware. It’s all still with me somehow as well. A few years ago, I took my now girlfriend on a “date” to an aviation museum, but it was mostly just me jabbering at her excitedly: “Oh look, the Iraqi MiG-23s that were sent here for repairs before the Gulf war!”, “SOKO Orao! A Yugoslav-Romanian co-production!” Did any other fellow war nerds read Venik’s aviation(aka aviation.ru)? It was a website dedicated to Russian and American aviation nerdery in the late 90s, early 2000s. The dude was Russian, but the site was in very fluent English. I always wondered who that guy was.

Mark Ames

Thanks for this!

Doug Cartel

Anybody who is shocked by Sanders liking the F35 hasn't been paying attention for 4 years. It's why you shouldn't treat these candidates as anything but tools for advancing your agenda- don't worship them, don't pin your hopes on them. They're just there to steal time from the Nazis.

Carter Adams

It would be interesting if someone were to write or record an analysis of the various ways the US extracts tribute from its empire. Looking at weapons sales and the bond market and probably things I'm not thinking of (I suspect higher education) in a unified way as part of a system of power.

Mark Ames

This is a great (and highly ambitious) idea

Larry Dimes

I know I'm a bit late in writing this, but as this episode touched upon one of my favorite hardware topics I couldn't let it rest. The War Nerd said he disagreed with Mr. Cockburn regarding the nukes. I’m inclined to agree with Mr. Cockburn; I got into war nerdery from the opposite side of the table from The War Nerd in that I had and still have an interest in the nukes. I’m a physics student, what do you want? All this talk today of restarting the nuclear arms race, of pulling out of the INF treaty, of the B 21 Raider and all the rest of it; Those are all Nuclear Accessories, to borrow Hank Hill’s phrase. The bombs (or the physics packages, if you want to use the jargon) themselves are rarely mentioned. But the bombs are the key point; they’re the stars of the show and they’re prima donnas, finicky and fussy. Pop culture presents nukes as being like that box of grenades Arnaud de Borchgrave allegedly found on some Vietnam hilltop. You can just pull them out of the mud and shit and start lobbing them at commies or whatever. Nuclear weapons are not like that, they age. Radiation damages their onboard electronics and causes the explosive lenses that compress the primaries to degrade. Radioactive decay of the various isotopes in the primaries and secondaries has consequences too. In short, we aren’t entirely sure the bombs will work as designed. As an example, the current mainstay warhead in the US Trident II SLBM fleet is the W88 and that is a product of the Reagan years. Even the newest bombs are in their 30s and a lot of them are older than that. This brings me to the next part which is our old friend nuclear testing. Now, like I mentioned nukes are prissy things, and the high temperature and density physics that goes on when one of these babies is popped off is not understood too well theoretically (read up on the NIF at Lawrence Livermore if you want an idea of just how shitty some of our models are; its why controlled fusion has been 20 years away since Peron had the Huemul thing). So, if you want to design and build new warheads, you must test them. Doesn’t have to be a full yield CASTLE BRAVO or Tsar Bomba style test, an underground sub yield test is fine. The US and the Soviets did that for most of the Cold War (and this is what North Korea still does, which is why ironically the most up to date weapons physics people on the planet live in the land of Juche. They still have an active testing program). Nobody in DC or Moscow or Beijing is talking about resuming nuclear testing, or building new bombs. It’s all just money for nuclear accessories. It doesn’t matter if the nukes work or not, from the perspective of the MIC crowd, because a bunch of money can be made off the new missiles and bombers and early warning radars and modernized electronics packages and so on. The bombs are an afterthought. Just to be clear I’m not here to start a flame war about nuclear testing and building new nuclear bombs, I just wanted to provide some evidence for Mr. Cockburn’s argument that the defense establishment and their enablers in congress do not care at all about whether or not the United States will be attacked. It’s graft all the way down.

Evan Lichty

I just wanted to chime in on Andrew's line, "It really is all about the Benjamins." To wit, flying dump truck indeed! The A-6 got a Hollywood treatment (script drafted by John McTiernan), in the 1991 adaptation of the novel Flight of the Intruder, which included Danny Glover and Willem Dafoe. https://g.co/kgs/nDPd4p

Ilya Fishman

Late comment (duh). It makes me crazy. Hundreds of billions wasted on utter bollocks.

Lord Omlette

I didn't read the notes before listening so I was randomly surprised when Alvin York came up. Sabaton did a song about York (the person not the weapon system), but I prefer this cover https://youtu.be/rtA9v5J76XY