EP:62 - Special Guest: Bill Buppert, on Iran

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1:00All humans break. The difference between humans and gods is that gods can break humans. Negotiate now. And this war. You're watching Provoct with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton, debunking the propaganda lies of the past, present, and future. This is Provoct. All right, you guys. Welcome to show it is Provoct. I am Scott Horton. He is Darryl Cooper. And he is our special guest, Bill Bupert, my good friend. He is the Smedley D. Butler Fellow for conflict studies at our Libertarian Institute. And he is also one of our guest professors at the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom at ScottHorton.com. And this is our show Provoct brought to you by expatmoney.com slash provoked.

2:03And I'm really happy to have Bill here. This is going to be a great conversation, mostly between these two guys. I can already foresee. But I must bring your attention to the most important thing that Bill ever wrote, which is his review of Fool's Air. And it says, if I could give six stars, I would. If you read one book about the Afghanistan debacle, this is it. I spent nearly two years there. And everything Scott writes about is true. I've come to the conclusion that the purpose of all of America's wars since 1871 is to expand government power and provide a sophisticated money laundering operation for the military industrial congressional complex. He's reading a primary and secondary sources is deep, wide, and insightful. He takes the time to follow narrative events to their conclusion and explore what caused them in the first place. There are like in here, but I can't watch. I can't watch. Legendary. Oh, I'm just wondering here. Hey, Scott, hang on. Can you hear me? Yeah. Bill said he can't hear you, but he can hear you. I can hear you. I can hear Darrell, but not you. Well, you can hear me, right?

3:04Darrell? Yeah. Don't tell me I'm muted again. No, no, I hear you. They'll lost me. I don't hear. Ow. Well, good. But I hear Darrell. He can hear it. Look, look, look. Hey, look at Scott. Scott, you talk and I'll sign while you talk. Well, if you guys go ahead here, Phil, he can hear me. Darrell, tell them that everybody else can hear me. Yeah, I think everybody else can hear him. So he wants us to just go ahead and pick it up. I'm just going to, I'm going to finish introducing him and then turn it over to you, okay? Okay. Okay. Bill, as you can see, he was in Afghanistan. He was an army officer. He is our fellow, a Smetly Debutler Fellow at the Institute. Here is his great new piece on our blog failure to launch. This we won't defend, which you guys are about, are discussing here. And then here is his two great podcasts that we feature at the Institute, the Chasing Ghosts Podcast, which is focusing on refuting counterinsurgency strategy,

4:05doctrine and how there ain't no such thing and don't even try it stupid and so good. Oh, man, it's so good. And then also, broader takes on more things, war notes, a conflict podcast. And this is just top of the line stuff for all you military guys in the audience. This is your guy. You're going to love his podcast. So good. It's all at libertarianinstitute.org. And with that, I'll just turn it over to you, Koop. Cool. So I can hear him a lot of clear. Yeah, Scott, I was going to say, I don't know if we would lose the stream or not, but if you can, just bounce out of here for a second and come back and we'll try it again. But I'll take over from here. There's a bunch of stuff talked to you about tonight, Bill. You and I should have gotten together a long time before this, but I'm going to try to try to fit everything into a reasonable timeframe. The first thing I want to talk about is maybe a bit of a diversion from what will spend most of the episode on. But I wanted to get your thoughts about, last week we were talking about the Houthi advance and the Saudi Arabian military.

5:05And I kind of made some offhand comments about Saudi Arabia's military limitations. Their inability to kind of feel an effective force and made some kind of, you know, kind of rather low resolution, you know, silly, goryly thought out comments about Saudi society in general, you know, that we're sort of the reasons I was giving for that. But the underlying point, you know, the inability of so many of Arab countries in general, but, you know, the monarch is in particular to feel the effective military forces is a well-known thing. People have written and spoken about it for a long time. And I was just wondering what your thoughts were on that. Like, you know, what are the main limitations that a country like Saudi Arabia, which has the money, has the population that theoretically could feel the effective military force,

6:07but they just can't seem to do it. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. So Saudi Arabia, the House of Saud, imagine having the House of Bush as co-nice, you know, in America, created at the end of World War I as a result of Te Lawrence, going to the British authorities afterwards, the psych, the psychespeak O' Agreement, all that kind of torpedoing that goes on. I was very fond of a comment you made in one episode where you said, hey, I'm the guy who will go back just like Putin did, and I'll go back to the 12th century and move forward. So I really think that we have to look at that when it comes to Saudi Arabia, because the problem with Saudi Arabia is, Kenneth Pollock did a group call, did a book called, Armies of Sand. In Armies of Sand, he talks about the fact that Arab armies cannot do conventional warfare for a variety of reasons. And when you look at Saudi Arabia,

7:07they have become so wealthy with oil that when you go, I think you've been to Saudi Arabia and so have I. When you go to Jeddah or Riyadh, and you enter that airport and you come in, what's gonna happen is, you're gonna see cues for diplomats, you're gonna see cues for Saudis, but you will see dedicated cues, dozens of them for Filipinos, and for Pakistanis and others, and they do all the work there. Kenneth Pollock makes a really interesting point too, in Armies of Sand, where he says, if preventative maintenance is how near-parent peer armies fight and do it effectively, you've got to do that organically. The Saudi Arabians as all Middle Eastern countries do not do that organically. They are absolutely incapable, culturally of doing preventative maintenance. And when you're using exquisite platforms, like jets, tanks, IAVs, all of those things, and you don't maintain them. And what is a rather harsh environment?

8:09Try flying a helicopter, I think you've been in Iraq, maybe Afghanistan, I spent two years in Afghanistan, some of that talcum powder sand, it causes a lot of grief for mechanical devices like helicopters, tanks, things like that. So if we fast forward now, the way I look at Saudi Arabia, as I look at it with a real skeptical and cynical eye, because I have something called, I hope I'm pronouncing it correctly, I don't speak Arabic, Mahabith, or maybe Mabahith, but I think it's Mahabith, which is their security service, sort of like the former Iranian, Savka, Savik, and things like that, really brutal. I mean, the CIA had organizations where they would do black sites in, what is now, Mayan Mar, what it used to be, Burma, and they had black sites for rendition in Saudi Arabia, it is alleged and did evil things that evil people use in the Saudi means to do torture, because they've been doing it for the longest time.

9:10The other thing I think we have to recognize is that, when you look at Sunni projection and financial support of terrorist organizations, Wahabism is ground zero in Saudi Arabia. That's where that evil form of jihadist poison has emanated from for most of the world, throughout the Sunni centers of gravity and things like that. What we're seeing in Syria, in other places is the Shia crescent, and the Shia and Iran have had a relationship, the Shia and Iran and Syria have had a relationship for going on 110 years. They're very tight with each other. The West, to me, seems to wage war on Shia more so than Sunni, even though we saw them going against the Sunni in Afghanistan, for instance. But if you look at Iraq, what you had was you have this tiny minority, maybe it wasn't tiny, Darul,

10:10but it was probably a single digit percentage, or maybe 15% of Shia of Sunni ruling over Shia. That's why one would go to Kabul in Afghanistan and so many folks in Kabul spoke farce, spoke Iranian, because they were either Persian influencers, or they were Persian, or they had a very vital relationship with them. I don't think the Saudis can handle what Yemen's throwing at them. I think tactically, operationally, and strategically, they're absolutely incapable of fighting on their own. They need U.S. assistance, they need U.S. mentorship, they need U.S. machinery, they need Western machine, they need all those Filipinos, and folks who come in there that they import into the country to make the connective tissue of Saudi Arabia operate. And I know this is going to sound uncharitable. I have never met but one intelligence,

11:13Saudi military official. Because that just because it tends to be where they warehouse, the second and third and fourth sons of important families, and things like that, I know in some of the Arab countries like Iraq and Syria, where you did have this minority ruling over a different sectarian majority, you would have a lot of the, I guess high value branches of the military, your pilots, a lot of your special operations forces, things like that, would be drawn from the other minority groups. You have Christians, there's a lot of pilots in Iraq, things like that. Lebanon for instance. Right, yeah. And Saudi, I mean, the very fact, you sort of alluded to this at the beginning, the very fact that I'm pretty sure it's the only country in the world that's named after its ruling family, right?

12:14I mean, that by itself is, it kind of tells you that this is still, you get right beneath the surface, and you go past the photographs taken at fancy conferences in Riyadh, and this is still a deeply tribal society, and you have a lot of people who, well, have written about how in societies like this, there's not always easy to get people to military forces, combat forces, to trust one another enough to think that they're gonna have my back if things go bad. So, there's also in a society like that, just something that we've got maybe is becoming kind of endemic in the United States, but we're, I guess, we're falling from a greater height, so it still looks better here, but just this inability, like a system constructed where there's absolutely no incentive at all to report bad news up to Chain Command,

13:15and every incentive to just put it off, bury it, don't be the one who takes the heat for it, et cetera, until things just pile up, and we think we've got an effective Afghan National Army, and turns out we don't. And we find that out in 30 days. Right, all that time. Yeah. And what do I think, I mean, I've seen some people who are commentators on the region, I mean, they're speculating that if this goes on, this could be a legitimate threat to the Saudi regime's stability in general. I mean, you think it could go that far? I absolutely think that, and the only thing that keeps the Saudis aloft is oil money. The same thing with the UAE. The only thing that provides a lubricity for being advanced civilization is that very thing. And you were asking me earlier where you said, where there's a low IQ, and again, this may make some of your audience uncomfortable by stating this, but if you look at the country of Africa, and you look at aggregate, media, and IQs,

14:16they aren't high. When you combine that with Islamic regimes, that tolerate first and second cousin marriage, that doesn't end well generationally as they advance down the line and they have children. That's why you see a disproportionate number of birth defects, learning disabilities, and one could say mental retardation in societies in which that cousin marriage takes place. And because of the royalist monarchist, prince orientation of the Saudi house, where you have hundreds of members of them, there is encouragement within them that you cannot spoil the bloodline by marrying outside the bloodline. I mean, the British have suffered the same. I think that even when you look at some European bloodlines, it could be the case. I remember reading one book about World War II, where the Germans were doing an analysis of the royal family in England. And they said that, yes, the king has the brain of a chicken

15:19and has to be reminded to remove his clothing before stepping into the bathtub. So I do think that it can have cognitive effects, but again, to Kevin Pollock's point about Arab armies, and I'm very poignant about this, I was talking about conventional warfare, because Islamists excel at guerrilla warfare, at a regular warfare. And there are a lot of components to why that is. They are an oral culture in the places that we have fought, an oral culture that maybe develops those parts of their brains more so than us in the West, who tend to be a literate population, where we use reading for a lot of things. But I remember being an Afghanistan and being a Gog at some of the bloodlines that my, either my interpreters or A&A folks when I talk to them, they could talk about not only their grandfather's, but their great-grandfathers. They could talk 200 years down the line. And what they could tell me all about was blood obligations,

16:20clan obligations, honor obligations, and all of those kind of things. But I want to emphasize that bifurcation, sterile that when it comes to conventional warfare, Arab armies have just got awful. Would it come to you? I'm holding on. I got to make some money here. expatmoney.com slash provoked. What you do is just do that. expatmoney.com slash provoked. And it will take you to this great website where you can register for the expat money summit, which is a free event. They do this every year. It's at the very beginning of October. And it's a bunch of seminars about how you can protect your neck by diversifying your investments into other countries and perhaps even gaining citizenship in those countries and things like that with a special focus on Latin America this year. And yes, they have some upsells and things like that. But you can register for free at expatmoney.com slash provoked.

17:23Goodbye. Did you hear Scott right there? I did. Hey, all right. They make sure Scott joins us. Why is Scott joining us? Yeah, I don't know. What's up? Where you at, Scott? I was out. If the guests can't hear me, then I can't ask the guests. No, we got you. We got you. All right. Excellent. Well, then, hell, as long as you can hear me, let me tell you about Matt Cercerley. It'll help you if you're rich and you have money, but the government is trying to take it from you. This lawyer will help you protect your neck and dot your eyes in just all the right places to make sure that you don't pay them one any more than you absolutely have to. That is agresstaxadvice.com, Matt Cercerley at agresstaxadvice.com. Anyway, you guys were talking about what now? You know, I'm looking here at the chat while you were chatting. Arab armies, they are no good. You were saying I knew that. I'm saying they're no good. From a conventional perspective. And that's been proven out for the longest time. And when it comes to the unconventional perspective, and when it comes to guerrilla warfare, they excel.

18:26It's army, all right. Yes, they've done that repeatedly. But of course, the US Army hasn't won a conflict since the end of World War II. Yeah, well, I think we're all probably better off and by butt out of this conversation, turn it back over to Mr. Cooper here. Go ahead. I mean, go ahead, Darryl. You know, the, you sort of notice this cycle throughout history, right? Where there are periods where technology, material technology, social technology, they tend to, they tend to favor large institutions, consolidated, you know, large organizations that, you know, because it takes a lot of resources to feel the Bronze Age chariot or something or to fit out a heavy horse cavalry in the Middle Ages. Only certain, you know, very few people can do that. They need a lot of other people to support them just so that they can do that.

19:28And that sort of tends to lead to a very top heavy, kind of aristocratic society where all the war making power is gathered up into these large institutions that can defend their boundaries, you know, against interlopers pretty well. And when you got up to the late 19th, early 20th century, and you look at like the first, the first and second world wars, I mean, you have just these examples of the institution of the nation states sort of reaching their absolute apex in terms of, you know, if you just think of it in terms of state capacity, their ability to martial men and resources over sustained periods of time, it was just incredibly efficient, you know, relative to anything that has been seen in history and arguably has been, you know, is around today. And in the 20th century, the century that, you know, America and the second half of it didn't win a lot of wars, but we were still sort of militarily dominant in some sense.

20:29I think most people would, you know, would think of it that way. You know, that was the era of bomber fleets and aircraft carriers and just these massive systems that it, you know, really the only institution on the planet that could feel the apex weapon systems, we're not just nation states, but only the most powerful nation states could do it. Just they were the only ones with the wear with the, and if you didn't have that, then you were relegated to being a member of NATO, you know, a member of the Warsaw Pact, maybe, you know, a third part of the third world, but you weren't gonna be a major player. And today it really seems like we're kind of moving into, I know you read a lot about this, that the 21st century, that pendulum is really swinging back in the other direction. We're now, you know, these gigantic institutions that you had to have if you were gonna feel the weapon systems of the 20th century

21:30that allowed you to compete on a global level, you know, you had to create these gigantic, hyper complex lumbering systems that now, that technologies and some other changes have come along that have put a tremendous amount of destructive power in the hands of individuals and small groups. You know, a lot of these nation states are in a very bad position, and it seems like, I guess like, you know, I sort of, when I'm getting emotional about the failures of the American military procurement system, you know, I always think it's just that, you know, people don't want to reform it, but I'm not so sure that these gigantic institutions, you know, the 20th century really can reform themselves in that direction. And it makes them incredibly predictable. It makes them very easy to provoke and bait, you know, into making mistakes. And, you know, it seems like we're all kind of, I mean, getting a very early lesson in this in Iran right now.

22:37And, you know, some people, like somebody asked me the other day, you know, you want us to win the war in Iran, I mean, yeah, you don't think we should be there or whatever and should never have happened and all that, but you're an American, you want us to win, right? And I had to pause for a second, because I was like, you know, I mean, I don't want American servicemen getting hurt. I want this war to be over with as quickly as possible and all that, but I would rather learn the limits of our power, the easy way in Iran right now, than the hard way further down the line, you know? And, you know, what are the lessons, don't, like the most important lessons that you think we are getting right now from what's going on? Well, we spend a trillion dollars a year when you put in the DOE cutouts for nuclear weapons, research and things like that. And of course, the current Department of War says they want to spend $1.5 trillion. They're spending it on exquisite platforms.

23:38By spending it on exquisite platforms, what that means is that we're going to concentrate this wealth in these platforms that can be destroyed in the salvo competition by very small objects, with us UAS, FBBs. What we discovered from the Smow in 2022 is that here we have the Russians invading the Ukraine and then after they're in the Ukraine three years later, four years later, we discovered that 80% of all combat casualties are from UAVs and FPVs. As a matter of fact, we're finding that with TOE systems, because they can be spoofed as a result of being non-wire guided and wireless, they're going back to wire guided. That's why when this war ends, if it ever does, there are going to be these mountains of this fiber optic wire that's going to be festooning all the trees and everything in Eastern Ukraine. Before we depart Saudi Arabia, I wanted to say one thing,

24:39and that's this, the Obama administration, and I'm not a member of either party, I call them the UNI Party, as I think you are agree with. But the Democrats under Obama between 2008 and 2016, not only maintained forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, but they also started the war in Syria, assisted the war in Syria, advanced that war in Syria. Scott will tell you that that war in Syria started well before 2010, 2011, before the head shopper got into the presidency. Same thing with Yemen. What Obama told the Saudis is that what we're going to do is we're going to help you out in Yemen, and you can go there. If you look at a map of Yemen, I urge all the audience, if you get a chance, Google this, and look at a map of Yemen, and you will find the Houthi occupy the Western Third of that country, which is very mountainous. And I know the sounds, it's uprisally when I say this, but Vupert's Law Military Topography is that

25:42a culture of riflemen who know what they're about cannot be militarily defeated in mountain terrain. Even with UAVs, FBVs, we find that. We did not defeat the Afghans. The Russians did not defeat the Chechen. We will never defeat the Yemens. And the Houthi are very enthusiastic young men when it comes to fighting. They're very talented at the conventional edge, but they're very talented at the dispersed guerrilla edge. I mean, this is a country that has no navy, that has no missiles to speak of, except what it can get from the Brick's countries, who has chased aircraft carriers out of the Red Sea, chased aircraft carriers out of the region, because they're scared to death. I'm hoping, Darrell, that because of your background in missiles and such in mine, we can discuss this really hard problem of IAMD and missile capacity and salvo competition and magazine larters being empty in the West,

26:44because despite what that 60 minutes doofus said, the flagget who came on there, there's our kinetic magazines are winnowed. There was a CSBA report two years ago, since we gave all of these enthusiastically, of course, gave all these stingers to the Ukraine. Of course, you know that those stingers found their way outside of the Ukraine into market bazaars that they could trace by serial number, because the Ukrainians, it being the money laundering complex of the West, probably the central locusts, were selling those and using them against Russians. But the CSBA said that in order for us to restock and replenish those magazines of those stingers, it would take us 18 years minimum to do so. Now that's also assuming a 24, 7, 365 factory capacity, we do not have a carrying capacity in this country for creating stingers. We don't have a carrying capacity for shipbuilding.

27:44For every one ship, and we're lucky if we can build a dozen in America, when it comes to nuclear vessels, you're looking at six to 10 years, the Chinese are apparently doing about 350 to one. For every one ship we can build, they could build 350. Yeah, well, I mean, there's a lot there. It's like, you know, the incentives that are built into the system to favor these large complex systems, it's really hard having spent a couple of years actually standing up the procurement department of the installation I used to work at. You know, I really got a first-hand look at just how, I mean, I'm sure there's corruption at political levels and things like that, you know, things that we would call corrupt, but that wasn't even what I encountered. What I encountered was that I stood up our department on the base, right? I was talking to people at the distributed command level,

28:47you know, people at the Pentagon, you know, dealing with the procurement stuff, I never spoke with a single person that I came away feeling like they understood 10% of the US military procurement system and what was going on. Like, nobody seemed to have any clue what was actually going on. It's like, it's like when you talk to somebody, you know, like runs a hedge fund or something like that, you expect that they just understand the global economy and the finance, no, not really, not really. They find like little areas to arbitrage and stuff, but not really, nobody understands it. It's just dumb. It's a head scratcher with our acquisition system. And what I sometimes think is that in the 1960s, the Soviets said, there's no way we could beat US industrialization and production, even though we were midgets compared to what we did during World War II before 1945. That was something to be seen. But I often thought that, well, wait, what have the Soviets brought over their sclerotic and central planning mechanism and stupidity and somehow took defense acquisition university,

29:49translated from Russian into English. We adopted that because, and you and I, I think for hours, we can go into the nuts and bolts of just how sclerotic, arthritic, and sovietized the American acquisition system is, like with aircraft carriers. I don't know if you're familiar with, I've a real bone on my teeth about aircraft carriers. We can retire every one of them. Tomorrow, I would urge us to do so. It's such a tremendous waste of money, but we have something called the aircraft carrier on industrial base coalition. I am not on their Christmas card list. I suspect that Scott is not. I suspect that you are not. And we keep building these things that when you examine them into tail for their military ethics, they have no military efficacy today whatsoever. And the reason for this is because the totality of the US military establishment right now has created a premier 20th century peer fighting force

30:52that is absolutely not fit for purpose in this century for peer warfare. Now, I'm not using the word near peer because I think that's an anachronistic term now because the Yemenis have proven the Houthis specifically that they are appears to America, whether we like that or not. The thing about even in the 20th century, I have a lot of questions about how our systems, especially in the, say, latter or third of the 20th century, how they really would have held up an appear conflict. And the thing I think about a lot is, you think about some of the pictures of these old World War II ships from they had just gotten out of battle. And I mean, there is the carriers or just they got craters on the deck. They're just, they've been shot up. It just, and then I think about the USS Stark when that missile, that Iraqi missile hit it back in 83.

31:52And it went in, you know, near the front of the ship and the warhead did not even explode, but the fuel on the missile started to fire. And that thing was dissape, just from that. And you know, you have these systems that we build in redundancy to the systems and all that kind of stuff is best we can. But everybody knows they all have a lot of single points of failure. And when you're talking about, you know, catastrophic damage on like the platform level, some, like set one or more of those single points of failure is gonna get triggered. And then very quickly you end up with this super complex system that just, doesn't work because there's a fiber optic cable that's not hooking up right somewhere. And, yeah, when you think about something like our layered air defense systems, where, you know, you take out an early warning system and now the ballistic missile defense systems behind it, like have a lot of trouble acquiring targets in time to, you know, strike them at the ideal moment. I mean, the whole thing kind of breaks down very quickly, you know. Americans have no idea that they are defenseless

32:57against incoming IRBM and ICBM threats. Right now we have something called a mid course interceptor. And what it does is it does this magical thing and this is gonna riff with you, Darryl, because you understand it, is that when an ICBM or IRBM reaches Apogee, reaches the top of its parabola, it's going to tip and from that tip, one weapon or multiple independent reentry vehicles merves are going to emerge from there. This mid course interceptor is named that because it can only hit it in that magic moment when it tips because ICBMs have been hypersonic since the 1950s. And if a hypersonic is coming in as not terminally maneuvering, that's a hard target to hit. If it is terminally maneuvering, it is impossible to hit and folks don't understand, and again, I know you're gonna grok this. If I'm trying to intercept incoming munitions, I must send in two to four minimum missiles against it

33:57to get a probability of kill above 91%. So if I only have 48 of these mid course interceptors, then I'm sending two to four up, let's call it two. And they send in more than 24. And by the way, I'm assuming that every one of those hits and they won't, you're out of luck because it's going to penetrate this dome much as you saw in the George Powell film More of the Worlds 1953 with that dome around the tripods is we don't have the means to do this. And again, and Darryl, I'll stop after this because you got me on a on a tear. Here's what goals me about it. And fortunately, they call it Department of War now. The Department of Defense, the Missile Defense Agency, and you probably know the answer. What percentage of the total defense budget does the Missile Defense Agency get? Are you wasting? I jump in here now, because I wanna hear that, but also just wanna reframe the whole thing too. Because this is really your speciality, Darryl,

34:58in the DOD, and then also as a private employee or a contractor form, but I know it's a very special interest of bills as well. So my question for you, Cooper, is, is he right? All the terrible accusatory stuff that he just said about how well it doesn't work? All this Missile Defense stuff, and I know that you can't get trouble and say classified things, but I know that you can say, I'm classified things. So say all those. I'm very glad. You've heard me say similar things since, since the Iran War started for sure, and I've been talking about it long before that. I mean, it's, I mean, look, our system, the new age system, for example, the one that just rolled out on DDG25, brand new system. With the 5.6. Amazing system. It's like technologically, it's absolutely amazing. I was actually, I was working out at the test site at the Missile Ranging Co-I for six or seven months on the development team with that, for that system before it got rolled out to the fleet.

35:59It was in like the later stages of its development, and it's an amazing system. As somebody who had worked with, you know, earlier iterations of the ageous weapon system, this one is, it's decades ahead of even a Delta Victor, the baseline seven system that we used for. It's amazing. And yet, even that, all of those things that you just said still apply, it's still just incredibly difficult to shoot down an incoming ballistic missile once it tips. So it's just hard. It's hard not even from a, you know, you can acquire and track it. There are physical limitations to our interceptor missiles that makes it very difficult. There's just a lot of things going on. And people, I think, well, you know, you've seen it. I just have this, we started this war with this, you know, and I think this is true, even within the military and the decision-making levels of the Department of Defense, even they had this totally unjustified overconfidence

37:02and how these systems were gonna perform. You know, I don't, and I say that because, you know, we were talking about like Arab military cultures earlier and I brought this up and said that we have sort of our own version of it, you know, back when I was still, I was still in the game. Like I would be the guy, I spent a lot of time just out in the field. You know, I'd be gone eight, nine, 10 months a year. Some, a lot of it overseas, a lot of it deployed with US or allied navies, working with, you know, allies that we sold weapons systems to, things like that. A lot of time on bases, on ships, just interacting with, you know, service members on all these things, training them, helping them, you know, learn their systems, fix their systems. So I got a lot of like broad experience. You know, you come out of like, you do 10 years in the Navy active duty like I did and you know, I spent the entire time on one ship, you know, my tour on that ship was five years and besides that, I was basically in school and on short duty.

38:02And you get an idea of what the Navy's like but you've only been on one ship. I've been on all the ships. I've been on dozens of bases worked with, and we have this problem where, you know, I would come back from being overseas for seven or eight months. I've been on during that period of time, maybe 15, 20 deployed ships. You know, I spent time working with the guys at Bahrain, I spent time working with, just all over the place, seven, eight months and I come back and they're gonna have a sort of a town hall, right? Where the commanding officer and the technical director set up front and they want everybody's, you know, concerns or opinions like what's going on out in the fleet? And I would always be the guy who'd raise my hand and as soon as I did all of my like immediate supervisors and like one level up were just like, oh God, like they were like, here we go again. And I would start telling them what I was seeing out there and telling them the absolute truth

39:03and everybody in the room who had any experience out in the field knew I was telling the truth and the technical director and the commanding officer to their credit, they always wanted to hear it. But it got to the point where, at least they, in the meeting, they, you know, they wanted to hear it. But it got to the point where like literally my command would find other things for me to do to send me off to go do so that I would not be at these town halls. And you know, just that process of sort of passing negative information up the chain of command, being the bearer of bad news, it really, you want an extreme example? This is an extreme example, but I was, I was on a, assigned to a strike group back in, I think 2013, 2014. You know, there's, I think there are three destroyers, a cruiser and then the carrier and then some support ships and stuff. And so I'm out there mainly to work with the four air defense platforms, the destroyers and the cruiser.

40:04And you know, I would spend a little time on this ship because they've got a groomed their system and get all their alignments done and do a lot of advanced maintenance or repairs that you know, the crews haven't trouble with. And I need to train them. So I'll be there for a while. Then sometimes I would go to another ship once they were all kind of, you know, wired up. So I get out there and I'm assigned to, I think it was, I think it was on, I was on DDG 96 I think. And I get out there and I'm reading, I'm going through or before I got out there, I was on the carrier and I was assigned for a couple of weeks to the destroyer squadron, you know, on the carrier. And all I heard was about how this DDG 96 meant they are just terrible. Man, what a nightmare. They're just every day it's something with them and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, all right, well, that's where I got to go then. So I go out there, absolutely amazing crew as far as their air defense people. Awesome. One of the best ones I've ever worked with and I go out there and yeah, the ship had problems. Like are the system had problems,

41:05but they would report the problems up the chain command. It would make the way all the way over to the carrier and then they would go through the process of ordering the parts they needed, fixing the problems, et cetera, et cetera. And they would go through that. And so just, you know how it is, I mean, you know, just like you're out in the desert, you're bouncing around on the out on the ocean, these complex electronic systems break. You know, you're talking about putting megawatts of power through them in a dynamic moving environment like that, things break. While I had been the carrier with the destroyer squadron, the whole time I'm earing all this terrible stuff about this ship, I'm earing just amazing things about one of the other ships, which I won't name in fairness to the people who were there at the time. Best ship, they're getting all these bravo zoolos from the destroyer squadron, from the admiral, you know, everybody, just this there, just on point, everything, man, we never even have to worry about them. Well, they need help with a one day, I get called over from 96 to this other ship because they're air defense system.

42:06We're off, we're in the golf. Their air defense system just does not work anymore. Like it just one day goes from being perfect to it doesn't work. And so I go over there and the work center dealing with the air defense system, I mean, they had absolutely no idea what their system did. What their system did, they did none of their maintenance. They had no idea what was going on with their system. They just signed their signatures to all the maintenance cars and said they did it, they never did any of it. And of course, like this is a, you know, it's a super advanced, like complex system that your division officer, you know, he's a lieutenant who used to be a damage control officer and now he's gotten assigned to be the fire control officer. What a, you can tell him whatever you want. He doesn't know, right? Most of the time. The good ones over time start to learn. But most of them, you know, if you're a decent bullshitter, you know, a tech can put an officer off the scent because he just doesn't know what he's looking at.

43:06You know, he sits in combat and he sees the big screen, the big tactical screen in front of him. And you know, it's got your native Aegis tracks but it's got like 16 tracks, it's got CEC tracks. And all he knows is he sees a great big screen full of tracks. And the fact that we're supposed to be acquiring that, that, you know, airliner, commercial airliner at 195 miles or whatever, but we're only acquiring it at 60 miles, he is not, there's 100 tracks on the screen. He's not paying attention to that, you know? And so it just goes on and on. And I get there and the reason their system had fallen apart was not some gigantic catastrophic failure. It was that there were 20 failed components in this thing that they had absolutely no idea about because they didn't do any of their maintenance. They did none of their actual work. Couldn't have done it if you put a gun to their head. And finally, one more little thing broke and it was the straw broke, camels back and now all the tracks on your screen disappear and it's a big, you know, wow, they're having their first problem

44:08in this whole deployment. Can you believe it? And it's like that ship was getting praised up and down. They were getting awards from the destroyer squadron, all this kind of stuff. And the ship that was doing what they're supposed to do, that was when they had a problem, they reported it. You know, people didn't want to hear that you had a problem but you reported it, you fixed it when you got the part. They were like the dirt bag shit in the destroyer squadron. That is like an encapsulation of a much, much wider problem in the system because that mentality, you know, it's an extreme version and a small scale version of it, but that exists like, I mean, in my opinion, maybe Scott has some different ideas on this, maybe you do, but that's probably what happened in Afghanistan. You know, I believe that they're probably like the, you know, you get like a few levels up from the major down on the ground who's responsible for actually overseeing the training of the Afghan security forces. You go a few levels up the chain. They probably did think everything was fine.

45:10Just because it gets that gets lost in translation, there's people who like, well, I'm not gonna lie to my boss but I'll just soften it a little bit. And then he saw things a little bit for the general and then he saw things a little bit for the, you know what I mean? Like all the way up until they were just shocked. The way we thought it was gonna work. Let me interject here if I might and then, you know, turn it back over to you guys, but what we're talking about here is ultimately, never mind it, Ron, we're talking about how to defend the United States from a nuclear attack by North Korea. Probably not even Russia or China because in that case, it would be such a volume because, you know, they'd be pouring it on to make sure and so our defenses would basically be overwhelmed at that point anyway. They even say these are just designed for North Korea, basically, but they've got a few dozen if they wanted to really start launching NUX at us. And so my understanding is, I'm an amateur on missile defense here guys, but that what's so unique about the new Russian hypersonics

46:11is that these are lower altitude and coming in at shallower angles at hypersonic speeds around, I guess, mock nine or whatever that make it impossible to defend from them. But if you're talking about a three-stage intercontinental ballistic missile coming off a Russian submarine or coming out of Siberia and going over the pole, then that thing is coming in at mock 18. And so I don't know which all exactly different systems are designed really to protect from those or if not or what. And I want to hear what you'll have to say about this, but what I have to say about it is that my old friend Gordon Prey, the rest in peace, was the former chief scientist of the Army and used to work at Sandia National Laboratory testing H-bombs and well, at least A-bombs, I don't know. Yeah, he tested H-bombs out in the Pacific too. And so anyways, what he says to me is that the only legitimate missile defense against intercontinental ballistic missiles,

47:13I guess even from North Korea coming in, would be what we call neutron bombs, which the reputation of a neutron bomb is this evil weapon which is meant to irradiate and kill everyone with cancer or whatever, but then leave all the factories and taxas and the evil capitalist running dogs can take them over. But that's not what they're for. What they're for is knocking out avionics in space. So you have like a real thin shell on the H-bombe so that more of its energy is released as radiation instead of heat. And then so that way we can take out incoming Russian ICBMs. That's the only missile shield. There's incoming H-bombs. You hit them with H-bombs. Otherwise, forget it dude, you're gonna miss. They're going Mach 18. And so, and they're cold in space. And so all your heat seeking everything is useless. And so I wanna hear what you guys say about that because to finish that is, well, they're politically impossible to make. And we saw that with the new charm on them.

48:14They started making a few of them and then everybody was like, no, this is an evil weapon of genocide. And so you can't make them even know what they were really for was a defensive purpose. But anyway, now I'll be quiet and let you guys, I mean, that may be completely off base compared to new technology or what. So there's a list of things I need to get to because Darryl a few minutes ago. Yeah, and I just had it. So go ahead. So it's three tenths of 1% at the Missile Defense Agency of the entire defense budget that they spend on the Missile Defense Agency. And that simply tells you what their priorities are. Their priorities are not protected at home land, protecting the civilian population or any of that. It is all about the graft, the grift, the money laundering complex for these exquisite platforms and these large weapons. What Darryl was alluding to with DDT was the Arley Burke. The Arley Burke was commissioned. I think the last hole left in 1991, it is effectively the only US naval vessel that we've ever had that is effective.

49:16And Darryl, I spent time as an elistic guy in the Navy. I got my commission in the army to avoid sea duty. So I've got some experience with exactly what you're talking about. Nobody told you at the recruiting office that you were gonna be around the water. Well, they did, but you know what happens in the surface warfare community. As far as becoming an officer, even if you're an LDO, they eat their own, they eat you alive. It's, they grind you up as a human being. And the number one, I think you're gonna back me up on this. My number one asset, the nation of why the Navy has so many problems is sleep deprivation. And they haven't tackled that properly at all, especially with your Hayes Grey underway. And they had the, a couple of collisions outside the Strait of Hormuz, the 2017, and another one they tried to prosecute that young female officer who was the officer of the deck at the time. And she got acquitted because she got up there and she said, look, here's my schedule from the previous,

50:17like, you know, 72 or 96 hours. And it was completely insane. And I've been on, and you know, that's not like a, as you know, I mean, that's not a, that's just how it is. It's like one of those weird things where it's like, almost a, you know, if you, if you take any breaks as a, you know, as a aspiring department head or something like that, like, I mean, he's a part of guys like I used to, I used to room for about four months. I was on a destroyer and I roomed up with the operations officer in his state room. And he had this ridiculous alarm clock that made the most insane, loud, like rabbit being eaten by a coyote sound until he solved a couple complex differential equations on the thing that it would allow it to stop. It like forced him to wake up so he had to do that. And this guy, I mean, I, I don't think in four months, I ever saw him sleep for more than 90 minutes, 120 minutes at a time. And I mean, I saw him go days without sleep on the regular. And it's like, yeah, you can't really,

51:19I mean, you're talking about putting somebody in charge of like the Combat Information Center or the bridge of a $2 billion worship in a hostile area on an hour and a half of sleep in the last 72, it's insane. Those two captains cappons on board the carriers when you and the battleships were two, I was just at the USS Alabama Museum and Mobile, Alabama. Well, the captain has a very large state room below decks. But right next to the bridge is a smaller state room for him. If I want to hear your dumb new job bonds, this is boring. Okay, okay, let me finish this. If a captain isn't near the bridge, he's not in the action. If they sound general quarters, he's gonna be awake. I guarantee you, Darryl knows this. If I'm the captain vessel, leave in a DDG and it's peace time, they're gonna wake me up twice a night with something. The OOD's gonna wake me up for something. Now, when it comes to what you're talking about with defending ourselves against nuclear weapons,

52:20I wanna talk about the Erashtnik very quickly. The Erashtnik would be the conventionally-tipped hypersonic missile that the Russians have created and successfully used. By the way, America spent tens of billions of dollars on three separate hypersonic missile programs, the Dark Eagle being one of them. They're all signal failures. We haven't gotten any of it right. Now, this is for offensive weapons. When it comes, if I took every patriot, every thad, every anti-air modality that we currently have available to us in the US Army, and we were alerted that a Chinese fleet was on its way to hit the West Coast. The only perimeter that I could secure is San Diego County. Now, if you go to the A2AD complex in China, along their entire eastern coast, where they're behind the Second and Third Island chains, going out to Japan, the Philippines, and such, they have that locked up type. They have a locked up type with depth,

53:21and they have lots of very effective munitions called anti-ship missiles. Are they DF-Stereo? DF-21s? 22s? I think it is. They're the radiosals. And those radii keep going out. Those radii, Scott, are going out to such an extent that pretty soon the carrier, and I hope they do this anyhow, won't have to leave San Diego or elsewhere on the West Coast. Because they'll be within range of all of these Chinese missiles. At one point I want to bring up, Scott, and you and I have discussed this. We are a global headjamaan. Because we're a global headjamaan, we're very poor at defensive operations. You will find curiously enough, Darryl Noses, from historic inquiries. If you're a regional headjamaan, and you are contiguous to neighbors who don't hold you in the eyes to steam, and may in fact invade you, you spend a lot of intellectual and martial capital on defense. You will note that America,

54:23because of the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean's for one thing, but also because of our hubris, we spend no time on defense. And again, Darryl alluded to this. Our logistical chain to supply everything is very perilous. It is one that... You take out lengths in this chain. What's that? It's dependent on China. I mean, for the navigation system, you know, these rare earths and all that, I know you're always covering that. Yeah. Yeah. So wait, now, what about what Gordon says that all the Darryl's missiles can't shoot down a real Mach 18 ICBM coming in from outer space? And so the only real way to defend against that is with another H-Bomb, sent up to intercept it. So I don't... I mean, look, I'll just say real quick, I'll let that take over Bill. Go ahead. They're physically capable of doing it. We do tests where, you know, I've described this one here before. I mean, we make sure the conditions are absolutely ideal,

55:25you know, to intercept the target when we're testing from the weather to the atmosphere. And they sell fear to the fact that we do account the intercepting, you know, platform they're in on the countdown, you know, of the launcher, saying 10, 9, 8, 7, 2, and they've launched. We know where it's being launched from what the trajectory is, what the exact moment that it's going to, everything is coordinated and choreographed. So if that's the case, we could shoot down a missile. I mean, it's possible. We could very well also miss. I mean, there's a lot of things that could, that make it difficult, but it's possible, it's physically possible to do. But when you factor in losing the first six or seven minutes is like you wake up the president and tell him what's going on and get everybody on station and figure out a physical problem and all that. I mean, at that point, like now you're reacting very quickly and it's very, very difficult. And especially since, I mean, you're not going to be 100% sure,

56:27you know, A, you're going to be surprised by it. B, you're, you know, you're not going to necessarily know exactly where that thing's headed. There's just a lot, all of those things that we try to control when we set up a test aren't going to be present, you know? And so it, it, in that case, it's extremely difficult. Wait, I want to say, hold on, I want to dress what you were saying. Scott, I want to dress. Wait, wait, I just want to drop a note. There's a thing back in late Bush years or maybe early Obama in Washington Post. It was either the times of the post, but I think it was the post. They published it on a Saturday. It was a first person thing by a guy from the military industrial complex explaining how man, this whole thing is just a boondoggle to screw yet. And we are still in so much money in the name of this missile defense, and it does not work. And it was like true confessions of a, of a, you know, missile guy, but it, you know, it was very explicit. I'm pretty sure it was in the Washington Post. I can find it. Go ahead, I'm sorry. So, so what I'm saying is this is there's something called natural space. And what natural space means is that once you get past

57:28the atmospheric level, for all your electronics on board, a sophisticated modality that goes into low-earth orbit, there are a lot of things that have to be done to shield it. And things like that. But I want to offer this other thing. If we're talking about taking them out at a Lagrangian point or a low-earth orbit place around the globe, have you guys seen and the audience? Have you guys seen how crowded it is up there? Have you heard of something called the Kessler effect? Now the Kessler effect is this. If I lobbed a one-ton bag of sand, thanks Elon Musk if you'll afford me the opportunity. And I do an omnirectional blast and low-earth orbit. I think Daryl is between 300 and 500 kilometers. I'll park it in a nice sweet spot there. And I explode that. Scott, think of what this does as a pinball by cascading effects going throughout. Where all of a sudden I hit a satellite, satellite shatters.

58:30Parts of said satellite, they start to maintain velocity. Something that is in space, if it's traveling at 16,000 miles per hour, it doesn't slow down after it's been hit. Most likely it will act as an accelerant. Now what will that do to this vast panoply of satellites that are out there to include the Elon Musk's 11,000 satellites that he's put up there for Starlink? It will be an absolute catastrophe. And I think that's one thing that the space farce and these other organizations look, it could be the Chinese, it could be the Russians. If you detonate something up there to stop a nuclear weapon, you could very well take out literally tens of thousands of orbiting platforms. And what it could possibly do is two things. Number one, it would blind us from using non-air breathing technology, which is what satellites are. Number two, how could we penetrate that

59:31to go out into space again after that happens? I mean, when do things that are accelerating around and assume a gradient, when do they stop? So, and I want to offer this too, USS Aaron Ward, May 1945, picket ships, 5,500 sailors at the Battle of Okinawa die. 36 ships were sunk, 350 ships were damaged by Japanese kamikazis. What's really interesting about the kamikazis, but Bill, that's 1945, what the hell does that have to do with today? Here's what it has to do with. When you look at Group 3 and 4 UAS, it's the large ones, like the scan Eagles, the larger modalities like that, they can turn to Limonuver. Well, kamikazis can turn to Limonuver. Even if at the time they were dead at the stick, that plane is probably maneuvering, the amount of lead that they would put up into the air at the time on those picket ships to down these kamikazis was absolutely incredible.

1:00:33As a matter of fact, at the Battle of Leitegolf, there were battleships in train, and the battleship commander talked to the other battleship commander, and he said, is that ship on fire because they were using their anti-aircraft weapons? And they were so bestuned with them at the time, that this wall of lead was going out there, but the kamikazis would still penetrate. That's the point with all of this, is that salvo competition is, if I have more missiles than you do, then in the end, I'm going to win if I can send them aloft. When we look at Iran not this year, but last year, we all recall when Iran was lobbying all of those munitions against Israel. I think Scott, you and I discussed this. When they did that, my conjecture is that the Iranians went to all of their ammunition supply points, and he said, I want your oldest lot numbers. I want your oldest missiles. I want you most ineffective missiles, because what they did is they conducted a reconnaissance

1:01:34by fire on the Israelis to determine what their defensive dome was for integrated air missile defense there. They tried to determine what are their clock times, what's their human and the loop, what are the reactions, how many do they send aloft to intercept me, and do all these things? And that's one thing I want, before I get it over to you, Dar. That's one thing I want to leave people with. Please don't assume that the Iranians, the Persians are a stupid people. And by the way, I don't want you to think that I think the Arabs are stupid people. I do not. They excel at certain things militarily. When it comes to the Iranians, they are not a stupid people, and they play chess. They don't play checkers. I would suggest that the Israelis play chess. There's no doubt in my mind. I have no doubt that the awful office plays checkers. Well, before we do get out of here, I've got to, I guess I just want to see the smoke come out of your ears. But I'd love to hear your opinion on these new Trump class nuclear battleships

1:02:34that he wants built. I am so glad you asked that question. Number one, they're not battleships. Would you look at them from a whole perspective? They are large cruisers. All our Taikon to Rogus, 26 and 27. When they're going to retire all the cruisers, you had mentioned Darryl that apparently you were in a flotilla where they probably had Taikon to Rogus. And at a time we had nuclear power ones. I'm going to make a very bold statement here, and that's this. The days of the aircraft carrier and all surface naval vessels and blue water combat are over. There's no sense in it at all. So if I'm saying blue water combat, what I mean is these great Godzilla battles we had from 1941 to 1945 with the redoubtable Japanese, that stuff's not going to happen anymore, which means this, our navy will be deployed against lateral conflicts. They will be near the beach.

1:03:36If they're near the beach and that antagonist doesn't happen own a single ship, I think with the Houthis in Yemen, they deployed 1974 or older vintage Soviet patrol boats that probably were not in good work in order, but they managed to shoot our UAVs out of the air. I think to the number of 26, they were able to send carriers scrambling, the carrier apologists and flaggots will always say that oh no, they were redeploying to go to a different place. No, they weren't because there's no carrier safe in lateral waters in which there is a sophisticated missile system because I don't have to sink a carrier to turn it into a future fish apartment. All I have to do for a carrier is I take one shaft out, I reduce its velocity forward for it to get the sufficient speed to launch aircraft. Or I put a five degree list on the aircraft carrier, it cannot launch. There's a reason that when you look at aircraft carriers

1:04:37from above, there's a five degree cant of port of the aerial takeoff corridor for the aircraft off the deck. Why is that? Darryl knows why. That way you don't run over the ship. If when he's at full military power in that cat, especially a non-steam cat, like the e-mall system, God help us. You're gonna run over the ship. That's why it's designed so that when you're a full military power, which means that throttle is all the way to the stops. In addition to the catapult impulse and impetus, that's launching you off. It's a combination of physics of both of them to get it off. You don't run over the ship. By the way, go ahead and run. Well, but I have to say, I saw a whole documentary about this and it was the British who invented the cock-eyed landing strip and the Americans refused to adopt it because they didn't want to. Even though the bridge proved that no, it works and what had happened, what kept happening was they kept crashing into all the planes parked down at the end of the runway

1:05:38and killing themselves. And guys were just dying over and over and over. And then they said, look, you could just put the runway crooked and the Americans were like, no, no, you can't either. And they kept it that way. It was, I think, during Korea. And they kept it that way because they didn't want to adapt. Which is kind of, you know, apocryphal to your whole time. Oh man. I'm gonna tell you, Darryl, you and I have lots to talk about. And I know that we're run a time. We need to talk about a half-track tactic. We need to talk about mission command. We need to talk about why our land forces aren't up to par. We need to talk about why the UK would say silly shit. Like, well, then we'll send a battalion or a regiment over to Greenland to help them out. Here's the thing you don't know. Again, Darryl, we could take hours talking about this. How many British Army regulars are there? 75,000. A tooth to tail ratio is my trigger pullers versus my logistics tail. It's traditionally one to 10, 11 or 12.

1:06:38What this means in grunt math for the UK is, if you took the Royal Marines and you took their pararigment and you took all their trigger pullers and every one of their horse cavalry, the Queen's cavalry, whatever the case may be, and they're not writing horses, that's just a name. If you took them all together, you'd be lucky to come up with 8,000 fighters. And there's a one-third rule here, which means that I can send one-third of those guys out, but one-third are in training and one-third are doing an administrative refit. They're doing a fit to go forward to do something else or they're in training or maybe they're on leave. Whatever the case may be, we have the 82nd Airborne Division and they're on standby. We have an entire division that we can parachute in Airland, BS, we cannot. And we should not. We should only have past-finders and lurps on parachute duty because they can air land the rest of them. We don't have the C-17 strength to deploy. We do so much blow-hard stuff

1:07:39when it comes to the US military where they say stuff about our capabilities and we have no checks to cash to fulfill those. It's one reason why, thank you, Scott. I was able to do that nine-hour course on trail of tears, American, stalemate, and defeat at the Scott Horton Academy, by the way. Please frequent the Scott Horton Academy. DC, we always ignore something. One more thought about the carriers is that, another thing about them is they're really strategic liabilities in the sense that it's very, very difficult to use a carrier against an enemy that sort of merits a carrier's attention. Unless you're prepared to get into a real deal like land invasion type war, like if you're Ron Sank, one of our carriers, this administration's in a real pickle. I mean, it's like, are we gonna just admit, oh, that was a huge mistake and run away, probably not.

1:08:42I mean, so it's like that it's a tripwire asset that if you're gonna put it in danger and it actually gets hit, man, like your hand is almost forced into a major, major escalation. And so if that's not what you're going in trying to do, then that's just another way that the carriers are a liability on a political and strategic level. Absolutely. So Scott, can I do some quick napkin math? If you don't mind, I think the audience is gonna be, they're gonna be amused by this when it comes to carriers. Let's do some math here, and Darryl, you can help me out with this. We have, we have debited carrier air groups from approximately 85 aircraft to 65. The majority of those are strike aircraft. And some of those are aircraft that blow corridors in suppression of enemy air defense so that they can go through and take out those missiles that happen to be on land so they can make a corridor for the strike package to go. Let's do our math then with one carrier. Here's what we have. And remember the one third rule? I probably got 22 birds available.

1:09:43Now, in order for me to do this effectively, I have a combat air patrol of five aircraft that must be a loft that protect the carrier. Then I have something called a B-CAP, which is a barrier combat air patrol, which protects the remainder of the flotilla that is supporting that carrier. So that means I have eight to 10 strike aircraft to send a loft to deliver their munitions as it were. Well, not only are they all not gonna have munitions because you're gonna have those ones that are gonna intercept and do the seed mission that's a pressure of enemy air defense. We'll call it six to seven birds. By the way, if they're F-35, bravo's or charles, they're gonna have a combat radius of 700 nautical miles, which means cut that in half. Let's call it 300-350 nautical miles for a strike projection. That carrier has to get that close to the A2AD defenses off China, for instance, during a Taiwan offensive. Why would you have nearly 10,000 souls in the flotilla

1:10:47in the carrier to send six aircraft to conduct a strike mission with the munitions on their wings or inside their nacelles? What, how does that make sense? In any universe, it doesn't, because from 1941 to 1945, aircraft carriers won that bloody war. Japanese gave it their best, but they lost. We built 110 carriers during that war. We couldn't get close to that now. But after 1945, the carrier, what Darrell was saying, has no military utility whatsoever and it's a vanity project, rant off. Yeah. Well, look, I've known a lot of real experts who have said that very same thing for decades. You know, I mean, they're even like studies from the war colleges and whatever. Since 1945? Well, no, but certainly, you know,

1:11:48with the advent of precision aiming for conventional ballistic missiles, you know, at range, where we have, you know, they had machine guns, Gatling guns for sea skimming cruise missiles. Like, say, for example, when the Israelis gave our blueprints to the Chinese for a little bit of money, we had these Gatling guns for that, which good luck, but there's no good defense for a ballistic missile coming straight down onto the deck. There's not. There's not. Oh, yeah. That was it. I'm not a lot of time to hit the carrier. I've done that 50 meters of that carrier. Right. It's whole be compromised. I mean, literally, I've told you this before, Scott, people, I think sometimes don't even believe me because it sounds kind of ridiculous, but as far as like anti-ship ballistic missiles, our best defense is to run away and hope that the thing can't be guided in terminal, you know, and its terminal stage. I mean, because it does take a little bit of time to get there. And if it's not terminally guided, then our terminally maneuverable,

1:12:49then you can, you know, sort of predict its trajectory and just run away and hopefully get far enough away by the time it gets to wherever it's going. 35 knots. Yeah. I mean, yeah. And so like that, but that's literally our best defense against, I mean, the past when we were, when we were, you know, really kind of not, we were worried about, like, saying, in the early 2000s, when that quote you gave earlier, or the article you mentioned earlier, Scott, about the whole thing being a boondoggle, you know, the entire Pentagon, entire US security structure was completely oriented toward the war on terror, had kind of forgotten that there would ever be peer competitors again in the history of the world. And, you know, in that kind of an environment, I mean, you still just insane to put a carrier like in the Gulf or near these places, but, you know, most of the people, the Taliban, they didn't have, you know, badass Chinese made, you know, anti-ship cruise missiles, they were going to shoot at us or anything like that.

1:13:51And our, you know, the aircraft on a carrier, just running PITIT, so 180 nautical miles out from strike group, like that was really our primary defense, was just don't let anybody that we think might have weapons get close. And because, you know, like an anti-ship missile, you're talking about missiles usually with, you know, maybe cruise missiles with ranges of 100 nautical miles, maybe two, I mean, 200 would be like a really, you know, really long one, unless you're in for that even, you'd have to have like surveillance aircraft in the air, all that kind of stuck to like help with the targeting. And so like, really it was like, if you could keep them more than 150 nautical miles away from the strike group, like that was our sort of primary defense. And we all kind of knew, and this is even back, I mean, when I was in the game, like in the late 2000s, early 2010s, everybody kind of just knew that, you know, if one, like when Hezbollah fired that, what was it, a Charlie 802, like derived missile or something that is really frigate no six,

1:14:54that if something like that happened, and, you know, the fire control man who was in charge of, you know, paying attention to the age of sectors wasn't off over in the corner flirting with, you know, the sonar technician instead of manning his console, which I give like a 50, 50 chance, if that's not the case, an Eddie Given moment, you know, assuming everything's fine, that one missile sort of leaks through, and like we got a cruise missile to shoot down. Okay, great. But if we're talking about like a real exchange, nobody had any illusions except for the fact that, you know, they were gonna, they were gonna go down with the ship. I mean, that's just, it's how everybody felt about it. Everybody just kind of knew that. And, you know, it just, it makes sense when you think about it, right? Because in those cases, I mean, the attacker has all of the initiative, they have a basic idea of how many, like of what your intercept capacity is in terms of,

1:15:55you know, the track load of your radar to, you know, how many engagements your system can handle at any given moment, because it's not that many, you know, to how many missiles you have, that can defend against various incoming on a platform. Like they know all these things, or they have some basic idea of it, and it just gives them all the advantages. And so we have these hyper, hyper complex expensive systems that really, in a way look like they're built for like 20th century peer to peer combat, which really what they're built for is to roll in to somebody who can't shoot back at all. And occasionally, if what they happen to get a, you know, a 1975, you know, cruise missile on the black market, and they load it up into it, you know, a shipping container on a boat and fire at us that may do we could take that out. That's really what the systems are practically designed for. So I think to, go ahead, no, I just saying,

1:16:56that's a, that's a, it's a sad state of affairs, but it really is true. So I want to positive thought experiment here for how asymmetrically, which is what I deal with a lot in chasing ghost Maya, Irregular Warfare podcast. What if we did this in order for America to conduct expeditionary warfare, which means we always have to leave Connus to go fight elsewhere? What would happen if the threat, and this could very well be within the Houthi's toolbox, all they targeted Darrell was power, portable power. They killed gen sets and they killed gen set mechanics. And they kept doing that, they didn't hit a tent, they didn't hit a ship, they didn't hit a tank, they didn't, any of that. All they would do is target our portable power. It would cripple our ability to conduct war overseas. If they did something as simple as that, what would happen for instance, if somehow, they managed to spike our water, or spike our logistical chain, or poison our logistical chain.

1:17:57I was always a gas, I spent two years in Afghanistan, the amount of money they would spend on bringing bottle water in. They didn't give us, they didn't give every soldier like Darrell and I, give us a $350,000 in expeditionary warfare filter, good for 15,000 gallons. Give it to me, and I could even go into an Afghan chauho, I urge you not to go to one. I could even go in there and drink something, and as long as I filtered out, I would be safe. Scott, do you know how much it costs, what the estimated cost was for a gallon of diesel once it made it into the Humvee at the flot, and went out to do the various things that we didn't have Afghanistan? It's in the book. I actually had missed the other day, because I was re-fulsering for purposes, but I don't remember anymore, with 400 something bucks a gallon. If I recall 115, but I'm going to give you the floor. I got to do it. I'm sorry. If you know it's for, I have no doubt, I have no doubt, if you say it's 400 a gallon,

1:18:59I have no doubt that's the case. I remember being a collingottet first tour. I was in cobbling my first tour over there, and two days into a 30-day cycle of giving the Afghan National Army their fuel billets for that time. They got 30-day billets of how much fuel they would have. And all of a sudden, two days later, they come back to us and they're saying, hey, we need more. And then we'd go out, I did some audits as it were. And what would happen, Scott is within 48 hours, they sold 90% of the fuel that, oh yeah, given them to their friends and family. And this happened across Afghanistan. And this would go on and on and on. I mean, it's a microcosm of everything we did there. I mean, the US State Department was an Afghanistan. And they, I'm a cruiser head. I love land cruisers. Well, they had a level seven up-armored land cruiser, half million dollars. And so the state department would go out, oh, they got a flat tire. They opened the sunroof and put a therm-micronate in to destroy it so nobody could use it.

1:20:01And then the state department spends one million dollars on an armored tow truck that never leaves a lot. And they continue to put thermites through the sunroof if they get a flat tire or have a radiator leak. So I mean, look at that. Look what I'm saying. I know you guys have seen, Darrell, I know you've seen this personally. The amount of waste that occurs in our expeditions overseas is unfathomable. Yeah, I've told Scott, I've spent entire six month deployments on Arleigh Burke class, top of the line state-of-the-art air defense ships, spent entire six month deployment chasing dows off the Horn of Africa, who are smuggling small amounts of hashies and a Yemen or something. It's just an insane misallocation of Rune Services. I mean, it's one of those things that's in hindsight. That way as we look back on it years from now, we're going to be like, oh, yeah, obviously, that was not sustainable.

1:21:01Why did people think that that was sustainable? But yeah, Darrell, every year, every year that general officer would come to Kabul to take over Afghanistan. And he'd stand there with his hands on his hips and say, I've got this. And the only thing he's got is a stick in his hand. And he's going to slam into the cash register at the end of the year. Let's leave everybody with that image. I got to go food max chickens and do some harvesting before it gets dark. Okay. I don't have the power. Darrell, we have a lot. We have a lot to talk about. I'm sorry, guys. I do have the Americans using the Taliban as security for their convoy, so they can transport gasoline across Afghanistan to get it to their bases. And then the Taliban take that money and use it to buy guns from the Afghan army who got them from us and then use those guns to fight our guy. So that was a big part of how that was straight out of like catch 22 or something right there. Good gracious. Over there that has the price per gallon for you.

1:22:01I'm sorry, Bill. We'll have to get that right here. Scott, I know Darrell's got a feed chicken. But did you want to take care of some of the coffee? Oops. I hit the wrong one. Scott, Gordon's flavor coffee is very important to drink in the morning. It's so much better than Dunkin' Donuts from Walgreens, man. Once you start drinking this stuff, you'll never stop drinking it. Scott, Gordon.org slash coffee. And then also the Scott, Gordon Academy. If you want to listen to this guy, Bill Bueber, talk about how America lost every war since 1945 in great and grave detail, then you're going to want to sign up for the Scott Word Academy, that's Scott Word Academy.com. And then also, Marter made, he swears to Jesus that he is going to put out a new episode of his podcast, Enemy, the German's War, sometime very soon. And that is a firm deadline and he's going to keep it, he swears. So that is at subscribe.martermade.com. And as long as you're over at Substack, also sign up for scoutwordenshow.com. Hey, look, I interviewed Eric Margley's again.

1:23:01scoutwordenshow.com and you can get the audio book of Provoct, which is almost all done up there. And then also I have to announce that I have an event with Joe Kent in the Great Dan McKnight as well. Next Wednesday here in Austin, hosted by Responsible Statecraft, Kelly Vallejois, hosting the thing and another guy, Adam Weinstein from Responsible Statecraft would be there too. And I'm on Tim Pools Show next Tuesday, Monday. Yeah, Monday, I'm on Tim Pools Show. And that's all I got, oh LibertyStickers.com. If you hate government and you want to tell everybody in traffic, I'm going to say, hey, government, then you go to memberstickers.com. I have some, I have some administrative, you have very quickly, if I may. Go, sir. I recognize your Kufu 101 t-shirt, Manir. So I know all about that. We'll have to talk about that sometime. We're all out of the shape. I have a revolution. Yeah, but Kufu's two more interesting. I'll let the audience check out what those extraordinary lads did in South Africa.

1:24:03So what I want to say is chasing ghosts and a regular warfare podcast, war notes, a conflict podcast in war notes. I did a series called Fight Club, Fixing Fight Club, in which I talk about everything from how to take care of the Navy, how to fix the Army, and why we should deep-six the Marine Corps, and why we have a strategic deficit disorder. And I'm also at the Libertarian Institute at the Smedley-D Butler Fellow for conflict studies. As he mentioned, the Scott Horton Academy. And I also want to say for what it's worth, I'm a huge fan of Daryl's work at MarterMade and anti-humans seared my soul over. Yeah, definitely check out Bill's stuff. If there's a lot of podcasts and shows out there that a lot of them that I like, but that if you listen to every single episode, it sort of becomes this repetitive, this war is dumb and what is Trump thinking,

1:25:03and just sort of this war of a polemical thing. If you really want to get down to brass tacks, like a lot of technical stuff, like inside dish on, you know, how things are run and how they might be reformed. You got to check out Bill's stuff. So, yep. And look, both podcasts are featured at the Institute. Jason Ghosts and Wernoutes. So you guys will love all of that. And by the way, look, it's our 10th anniversary this month. It was September 20th, and we found the thing. It's 10 years of the Libertarian Institute. It's me and Bill, and I don't know, 20 or 25 of the greatest writers and podcasters in America's Liberty Movement. And we don't do fun drives very often, but we're doing one right now, and we need your support so go to libertarianinstitute.org slash donate. And okay, that's it. The chip is off your shoulder until next Thursday. Thanks, Scott. This has been provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton. Be sure to like and subscribe to help us beat the propaganda algorithm.

1:26:05Go follow at provoked underscore show on X and YouTube. And tune in next time for more provoked.