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Radio War Nerd EP #363 — Trillion Dollar Pentagon Baby, feat. Andrew Cockburn (Patreon)

Published:
2023-01-29 23:40:32
Edited:
2023-01-29 23:42:35
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

Guest: Andrew Cockburn, Harpers magazine

Recorded: January 26, 2023

We talk to Andrew Cockburn about the DoD's tragicomic budget as it nears the magical 1,000,000,000,000 mark, to the accompaniment of crickets from our media-political "watchdogs".

Subscribe to Andrew's substack Spoils Of War.Buy Andrew's book The Spoils of War: Power, Profit & the American War Machine.

Check out past RWN episodes with Andrew Cockburn:-EP 296: Spoils Of War-EP 191: Pentagon Sleaze-EP 57: Yemen War

*That St Louis Fed double-y-axis graph mentioned in the episode:

*Interlude music by Brendon Anderegg — buy his music here.

Total time: 1:35:45

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here 

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Comments

Kellan Fabjance

Thanks for linking to previous Cockburn episodes, for newer subscribers like me. Maybe this will be the impetus for me to finally read his book which I’ve owned for more than a year

William

Budget increases but manpower down. Interesting

Ander Pierce

Guys guys, with that kind of money imagine how many shitty planes we can buy

William

I think I'm missing something - why is it that everyone thinks Russia's army is doing so poorly? Like, if they were better, it would go faster? I've read that people think Bakhmut taking so long is because they're trying to grind down and kill off the most experienced Ukr soldiers. In that case, speed doesn't matter right? Overall I just sense there's a disconnect between what we expect a war should be like and how it actually is. Who would've thought the Houthi or the Hezbollah would've done so well against their incredibly well armed opponents? Not saying Russia has pulled off a masterclass or anything. By all accounts they're fighting a style of war that hasn't been physically seen for 80-100 years, depending on which world war you want to compare it to. How is everyone so sure what they're doing is a debacle?

Ander Pierce

IMHO: Some of it is propaganda saturation, and some of it is multiple failed ops. Offense directed at Kiev, a lot of horn-touting about captured territory in the North followed by a strategic withdrawal from it, and Russian media figures talking about how imminently Bahkmut is going to fall...for months upon months.

J P 3

Michael Kofman at CNAS in one of his shows talked about the relevance of the A-10 to a kind of conflict like the one in Ukraine, and dismissed it. His point was to look at the performance of the SU-25 in the context of the Ukraine-Russia war. Estimates suggest about 40 have been shot down in the conflict (~20 Ukrainian, ~20 Russian) (this is according to Wikipedia, so take it for what it's worth).

J P 3

As far as a conventional war goes, look at Iraq 1991 and Iraq 2003. In the first case, the U.S. and its coalition effectively had boxed Saddam's military in over 6 months and degraded its offensive capability (Iraq at the time had an army with over 5,000 tanks, and hundreds of combat aircraft, it was a capable force). In 2003, it took about 2 months to effectively overthrow the government. Of course, the U.S. ultimately lost a drawn out insurgency. From 1991 to 2014, the combined losses of the US were also a fraction of the losses that the Russian's have had over the past 11 months only (estimates of around 100,000 casualties so far just on the Russian side). The Iraq War cost the U.S. less, but what did it actually achieve? Regardless of how the war in Ukraine ultimately plays out, Russia's ability to project its conventional military force has been badly degraded. It has burned through large ammunition stockpiles that were a legacy of the Soviet Union. It will take years to replace that capacity. It will likely take years to rebuild its military given the losses in its officer corp. What does victory look like at this point for Russia? The areas it has taken over in Ukraine are destroyed economically. In regions outside of the DNR-LNR it is likely to face a drawn out insurgency for years to come. If it succeeds in taking land further north and west, it is likely to encounter even more resistance.

PapaSoftPenis411

Can't wait to see you In London! You guys are right by my commute!

teh_drewski

Isn't it likely that the Chinese military is developing the same way the US military has for essentially the same reason - it's very profitable to build expensive crap and the contractors who are going to extract all that profit are very well connected? I feel like we should give the Chinese the credit of potentially being just as corrupt as anyone else!

xnfec

Related to the previous episode, I came across this on youtube. It is some recollections of a British observer of the Civil War: https://youtu.be/ct4NZGnElNs It includes the battle of Chatanooga and George Thomas is mentioned. If the link doesn't work the channel is "Voices of the Past" and the memoirs are of Henry Y. Thompson.

Doug Cartel

yeah the chinese government seems to exercise at least some control over the moneyed/property classes, but it's one of those tightrope acts where you can't tell how much of it is a ruse until it's extremely obvious. Like, they do anti-corruption campaigns and they will reign in rich people occasionally, but tolerating their existence always leaves the door open for wealth to become the ruling mechanism of your country, in the same way that merchants eventually usurped feudal lords and all that. China has used urban development as a method of dumping excess capital to stave off recession before, and it's possible they use the military R & D in the same way, but until someone leaks some extremely secret chatlogs on 4chan or something I don't know if we'll ever know.

David Andrews

I often wish you guys posted more of these episodes on YouTube so that I could entice friends to join your Paetron. This show would be an ideal candidate for sharing. Excellent interview and top-notch guest.

James Evans

great episode. When you're in the Old White Bean(/r), will you do an episode on local wars? Apart from Hampstead being bombed in WW2, the pub is only 9ish miles from Hadley Green (battle of Barnet, 1471) and only a few minutes from Jack Straw's Castle, pub on the alleged site of something or other to do with Jack Straw (Peasant's revolt, 1381). OK not that exciting... maybe one on Glasgow football hooligan wars, Inter-City Firm vs Style Mile Vandals or whatever?

NYCM&AHole

Please clean your plate dear; the lord above can see ya. Don’t you know Americans are starving so we can keep tens of thousands of troops in Japan and South Korea (to the tune of Alice cooper’s billion dollar babies)

Patrick Friel

Great interview, thanks guys. Re: the question you raise about whether our leaders are conscious of how insane their policies are. We're all familiar with cults like People's Temple and Heaven's Gate, which included some pretty intelligent and accomplished people. Is there a cult of neoliberalism? Watching Victoria Nuland's recent testimony, I felt like I was watching a cult member. Her sense of certainty combined with malice is deeply disturbing.

Sam Zeng

The US military industrial complex comes out of WW2 when the vast build up for the war never stopped. On top of that it was mainly handled by private companies. Chinese private military production is low, most of it is handled by state/military run enterprises like AVIC and CSIC. There of course would be corruption but it would be different that the US. Typically its real estate where you find endemic corruption in China.

a clash of purple

Cults like Heaven's Gate rely on tactics like brainwashing and sleep deprivation to control victims' minds (or at least compel them to follow orders). The RWN episode about Lyndon LaRouche delved into that. There can certainly be crossover between cults and ideology, but the 'cult' of neoliberalism doesn't have to resort to such extreme measures to keep people committed. You're giving liberals too much credit. Their ideological commitment is just based on their own shallow self-interest and herd mentality. Which, yeah, everyone acts in their own perceived self-interest, but it's one thing to, say, refuse to tip your waiter because you're a cheapskate vs. foment wars and genocide just so you and your criminal friends can make a few extra bucks selling weapons.

a clash of purple

The only way to know for sure is to see how the military operates in a serious war. Has the PLA fought any real battles since the war against Vietnam? The recent medieval skirmishes on the Indian border probably don't count.

Christopher Price

Because they're so incurious about the material conditions on the ground. They've spent almost a decade fortifying these cities with the training and supplies to match.

RT

I became a fan of the channel after seeing the unlocked Iran-Iraq war video on YouTube

Ross Kiro-Ward

Reply to JP: Comparing Iraq 1&2 with Ukraine is a bit disingenuous. I see the point you are trying to make, but ultimately they are vastly different conflicts. Many episodes of this very show have already given us a few of the main differences. We, the west, have been supplying and training Ukraine since 2014. Ever since the Ukrainian army fell apart against the separatists. It was a mess and plenty has already been written about the state of Ukrainian forces back then. This gave rise to some, let’s just say, unsavoury recruits being used to fill the gaps. But, this is for another discussion. There is no doubt that If Russia rolled into Ukraine back in 2014 it would have looked exactly like you’re description of Iraq when the US invaded. Ukraine too would have had a ‘capable force’ on paper, but nothing to back it up. Even the citizenry would not have been as fervent in their resistance as they are now. Again, this has been explored over the years on this show. So, why didn’t Russia invade in 2014? Well, look at the stories about ‘fortress Russia’ which have shown why they have largely withstood, or at the very least, parried the sanction packages. This takes time to build, and to plan. Basically, they may have won the battle for Ukraine in quick succession back in 2014, but ultimately they would have been decimated economically. This probably would have made true the wildest wet-dreams many have in the west about a Russian collapse. Getting back to why Iraq and Ukraine are so different is the fact that we have had 8 years to prepare Ukraine for war. For example, guest on the show Seth Harp all but confirmed western special forces being on the ground in Ukraine since 2014 preparing the battleground as he put it. Another guest, Jack Murphy claims sabotage groups have been set up since 2014 to infiltrate Russia itself. But, what is more more important is the intelligence we provide, the satellites, the propaganda, and, of course, the weapons. Iraq had no such support in either invasions. They were isolated, sanctioned and bombed indiscriminately by the entire ‘coalition of the willing.’ If they had even a 5th of the support Ukraine now has, the US would not have enjoyed such conventional successes. In other words, imagine a coalition on the same level of capabilities and resources as the US, and its partners, giving Iraq everything that I've mentioned. Could anyone safely say the US would have succeeded with their initial invasion? Of course not. But that would be the only way you could compare the two conflicts. And before anyone says Iran supported Iraqi resistance I will point out that Iran only supported the insurgency, and only after Saddam was gone and all traditional warfare had finished. Do not compare Iraq and Ukraine. It is lazy. We do not know how to compare Russia’s performance because we have nothing to compare it to. Not in modern terms - like it or not. This is a hybrid war on a scale we have never seen. The only definite answers will come at the end. And they will surprise everyone, including the Russians, but especially us.

Jonathan Penn

Just a few minor tweaks to a very interesting and very timely interview/discussion. 21 B-2s were built. By the time they were all brought up to the Mod 30 configuration, program costs were over 50 billion so each plane cost substantially more than 2 billion. Of course the Pentagon claimed the per airframe cost was much lower (if you don't count the program costs unrelated to actual metal bending, of course they are). One crashed on a runway in the Phillippines, resulting in the most expensive scorch marks in history (pilots ejected safely so humor is permissible) and another recently caught fire and may be a loss. The remaining 19/20 have been used I believe in both Afghanistan and Iraq, penetrating undefended airspace at tremendous cost and expense. The B-21 is essentially the same airframe with updated (read even more cumbersome, untested and untestable) electronics. As for the V-22 Osprey, in steep descents the thrust from the twin rotors hits the ground and bounces back to the aircraft. Too much rebound and the rotors essentially stall out, significantly reducing thrust. Losing thrust while coming in for a landing is rarely a good thing...I still hope that you will do a show on structuring the military to actually be useful in a reasonable future scenario- e.g. no surface ships (they are only targets if I recall a remark from Gary correctly), unmanned airframes carrying suicide drone missiles, far fewer tanks (again, only targets), etc. I think everyone knows war with China is a non-starter under any set of circumstances. First, it would devastate the US economy. Second, it would see all our carriers in the vicinity of China sunk. That would make the admirals very sad. Thanks for your podcast- I've learned so much over the years and look forward to learning more. Jonathan Penn

Magic Mikey

Reply to JP. As Ross Kiro-Ward said above there is really no comparison between the shambolic, war weary, obsolete Iraqi army in 1991/2003 and the modern, well-equipped, highly trained and motivated Ukrainian army in 2022. However, its notable that the success of the US in both of those invasions has shaped expectations of how “successful” wars should be measured. The erroneous lesson learned has apparently been “if a country doesn’t win as easily as the US did in Iraq then it’s a third rate clown army.” The correct lesson forgotten is that wars between peer level competitors are brutal bloody affairs with mass casualties on both sides. The widely held expectation that the Russian army would just roll over Ukraine, and that its failure to do so makes it a clown army and the whole invasion a debacle, is a result of these erroneous lessons learned and correct lessons forgotten. I don’t know if the Kremlin believed this war would be a cakewalk. Perhaps they hoped for the best and that the Ukrainian army would mostly just remain in barracks. However, they also prepared for the worst, as is clear from the apparently endless supply of Russian weapon systems and ammunition flooding into the conflict, while western stockpiles are drying up. Moreover, it’s also now clear that despite having a “GDP the size of Italy” Russia retained the industrial base to wage large scale industrial warfare while the west does not. Remember it wasn’t bravery, training, strategic brilliance or high tech weapons which defeated the axis in WW2. It was that the enormous industrial capacity which could be quickly switched to making weapons of war.

Doug Cartel

Kind of insane that America was more afraid of nuclear war when the enemy was ideological, and is shrugging at the doomsday clock now that the only thing left to kill over is rare earth metals. I can imagine why you would be more willing to risk it for pure resource wars vs ideology (how willing are you to die for ideals vs raw earth) but it's still insane.

Alex

I really don't understand this "Russian military incompetence" line you guys are taking. As I understand it, the Russians' strategy in Ukraine is similar to their strategy in Syria: to bait the enemy and grind them down while preserving their own troops and equipment. Bakhmut has been an absolute catastrophe for the Ukrainian forces, which is why the Pentagon has been officially advising the Ukrainians to withdraw for the last week or so. It's becoming clear that many, many more Ukrainians have been killed than Russians, not just in Bakhmut but over the course of the entire war. Russia decimated Ukraine's initial stocks of tanks, armored vehicles and artillery, exhausted Ukrainian ammunition supplies, and has since destroyed or depleted every Western shipment of weapons and ammunition that has reached Ukraine to date. This is a war of attrition which tilts heavily in Russia's favor, the consequences of which are reverberating through the entire West. The neocons have said that this proxy war is about bleeding Russia's productive capacity and souring Russian public opinion on Putin, but it's actually been the West that has faced these very problems. Not only are European NATO countries furious with the US over the pressure put upon them to give of their own limited stocks to this conflict, but internal US politics have also been negatively affected: just look at the debacle that was the Speaker of the House vote. Because Ukraine cannot produce its own weapons, it must rely on its Western sponsors, who cannot hope to keep up, due to the productive inefficiencies discussed in this very episode. And now, even top officials in the American military are now openly worrying about having enough equipment to compete with China in the Pacific. And so far, none of the endlessly recurring media predictions about Russia running out of ammunition, or failing to keep up production, or failing to mobilize enough troops, or collapsing under the economic sanctions have come to pass. Everyone understands that this is a proxy war waged by the US against Russia, so it seems strange to me that you guys wouldn't take into account the terrible consequences this war has had for America and Europe in your analysis of it. There's more to this war than who controls Bakhmut at the moment.

Galilayyo

Check out player.fm!

a clash of purple

I donno, I feel like the argument could cut the other way just as easily. The U.S. has infinite money to throw away in Ukraine. They can work out the kinks in their supply lines, at least enough to keep the war going. And what is Russia hoping to accomplish, anyway? Suppose they do occupy Ukraine. How long can they fight a counter-insurgency campaign before they just give up? The international support for Ukrainian resistance isn't going to stop just because the Russians run up their flag in Kiev or whatever. As for public opinion and whatever, I really doubt any of that matters to either side, except that Russians by and large aren't willing to die for this war and Ukrainians are. There's no reason to assume that any amount of Ukrainian casualties (short of literally every person in the country) will lead to their defeat. It's entirely believable that a sufficient number of Russian casualties will force Putin to withdraw. The idea that anything could happen to destabilize American politics is laughable. The shitshow among elected officials is nothing new; those people are just clowns put in front of the cameras for the population to laugh at. The people with real power are perfectly comfortable and have complete control of all the levers of decision-making that matter. They're also completely insane and stupid, and if they get their way they're going to destroy the world, but there's no one relevant in the American political scene who even wants to stop them. The American public is either checked out or 100% committed to incinerating the world through climate change or nuclear apocalypse. Maybe if there was some kind of mass defection from NATO, that would force a change in course? Like if every member country besides America left the organization and forced American troops out of their overseas bases at gunpoint? But that's not going to happen.

Alex

The supply problems in Ukraine are not just "kinks." They're serious deficiencies in productive capacity which would take years to remedy even in the best of circumstances. New factories would have to be constructed, new machinery fabricated, a new workforce trained to operate it, etc. And because basically all of European heavy industry relied on cheap Russian oil and gas imports, these things would have to take place entirely in the US, or one of its few remaining industrial allies, perhaps Japan. But the point is, the Pentagon has come out and said that even this small shipment of Abrams tanks might not be ready this year. These are problems money can't solve, at least not in the near term. As for Russia's goals with the war, Russia is now trying to force a Ukrainian military surrender, and will probably annex the Donbass region, which is populated largely with ethnic Russians, who speak Russian as a first language (and who, if you've listened to to the previous War Nerd episodes on the subject, are not exactly fans of the current ultra-nationalist Ukrainian regime). This would be a great victory for Russia and, whether or not Western leaders will admit it, a humiliating defeat for the West. I'm not sure where you get the idea that every person in Ukraine would have to be killed for them to be considered "defeated," but I would refer you to the entire world history of military conflict in which countries are defeated in wars without losing their entire population. Inevitably there will be an insurgency: the US is nothing if not a state sponsor of terrorism. But with Ukraine basically destroyed and Western military stocks being rapidly depleted, combined with the United States' insane pivot toward war with China, it won't exactly be a well-equipped insurgency. That doesn't mean it won't be effective, but the nature of insurgencies is that they happen after the war, and thus are a separate issue. And I don't think the West is as stable as you think it is. What we're witnessing is clearly the decline and fall of an empire. All of the US' behavior in the last couple of decades fits the pattern: an increasingly ambitious series of military fiascos that not only exhausts the military capacity, but hollows out the civilian economy in the process. By all accounts the West is headed for an economic crisis, and where economic crises crop up, political crises are never far behind. Of course, the ones at the levers of power are still in charge, but the financialized capitalist system is collapsing under its own weight, and more and more dramatic measures will have to be taken to preserve order, leaving less time, money, and political capital for foreign wars. Obviously this may not happen in the next year or two, but then again it very well might. These things always seem to sneak up on you.

a clash of purple

I guess where we disagree is that you think the insurgency phase is distinct from the open 'conventional' war, and I don't. The Zelenskyy regime might have to surrender, go into exile, or even completely collapse, but I seriously doubt that Russia can take and hold any territory that the Ukrainians don't want them to have. It might take some time to push them out, and I think some areas (like the pre-existing breakaway regions) are going to stay with Russia permanently, but even if Putin ends up with something he can call a victory, it'll be pretty empty in the long run. Also, and maybe I'm wrong about this, but my understanding is that the ethnic Russians in Ukraine (not counting the pre-existing breakaway republics) are not fans of the invasion and are still loyal to the government in Kiev, even if they don't like the way they're treated.

Alex

Yeah you're probably right about Russia not being able to occupy areas that don't want to be part of Russia, and also about ethnic Russians' opinions of the invasion, at least in the western, more "European" parts of the country. But Russia retaining the breakaway republics would be a pretty major win. Russian elites at least seem to take the Karaganov doctrine seriously--basically the idea that they should come to the aid of ethnic Russians experiencing political repression on their borders. So at minimum, some element of Russian national pride is gratified, plus whatever military advantage those territories confer. At present, however, the Russian military also controls a chunk of territory that connects the Crimean peninsula to the Russian mainland and denies Ukraine access to the Sea of Azov, which is a huge security win. I guess whether they can hold it or not will depend on the political sympathies of the people living there, which I don't know anything about. Of course, it's entirely possible that the West simply refuses any settlement of the conflict, especially if that entails relinquishing American investments in, for example, Ukrainian agribusiness in the seized territories. But the potential for a reprise of the Afghanistan conflict of the '80s is diminished by the simple fact that the breakaway republics actually want the Russians there. There's still a chance that this could all end in nuclear annihilation, but if the West decides that its looming war with China is more important (which it is, if you believe the increasing number of top generals and security officials critical of the US' current role in the Ukraine war) and that they don't want to end all life on earth, there's going to have to be some kind of rapprochement either formal or informal, and either way Russia will get at least some of its concerns addressed.

Matthew Brown

can anyone supply a link to the study mentioned in the episode regarding the Soviet's collapse due to its internal military industrial complex?