00:00:00.000Stephen Selmer, thank you very much for coming on.
00:00:06.680The reason I'm so excited to talk to you is because it's hard to find anyone who pays attention to the numbers.
00:00:12.740It's easy to find people with opinions and sweeping theories about this, that or the other, the rise and fall of nations.
00:00:18.060But to find someone who actually keeps track of what we're spending on this or that or what people think about this or that as recorded in public opinion polling, pretty hard, actually.
00:00:26.400And you are probably the most famous person who keeps track.
00:00:29.060So thank you very much for doing this.
00:00:30.820So let me just ask you, let's start with the Iran war and its popularity.
00:00:36.580So like democracy kind of demands if you're going to do big things that you've got public buy-in because you're doing it on behalf of the public purportedly.
00:00:45.980How is this war viewed by the public in the United States?
00:00:49.300It's the most unpopular war since polling began.
00:00:54.700The first poll, according to this joint poll that's been conducted on a near weekly basis since the start of the war through the present by The Economist and YouGov, they've polled Americans on whether the Iran war has been the right decision or the wrong decision.
00:01:09.760It started at negative net 13% net support, which means that 13% more people, 13 percentage points more people opposed the war than supported it.
00:01:21.620So most Americans opposed the war the day it started.
00:06:33.500So let's talk about that budget. The defense budget, or I guess now it's called the war budget because it's the War Department, has grown, you know, at higher than the rate of inflation, which is saying a lot. So where are we now on the defense budget?
00:06:51.960We're at $1.1 trillion. That's the enacted budget for fiscal year 2026, which actually ended on September 30th. So we're still at that level through this. It's called a continuing resolution, which continues the levels.
00:07:06.020Yes, that's the base budget that's enacted every year, plus it's the amount of money that came from the Big Beautiful Bill.
00:07:14.360There's about $150 billion in military funding in the Big Beautiful Bill, the first reconciliation bill passed in, I believe, July 2025 under the second Trump administration.
00:07:25.040So, too little attention is paid to this.
00:07:27.340So, $1.1 trillion, so that's by far the largest piece of the discretionary budget.
00:11:03.200To me, it's, if you want to look at it through a lens of, okay, how the military industrial complex operates, it gets an enormous amount of money through the annual military budget.
00:11:14.540That money flows into, obviously, profits and shareholders and executive pay.
00:11:20.060the executives at the top weapons manufacturers you get the majority of their revenue from the
00:11:26.800u.s government make 20 million 30 million dollars a year um and these are basically public firms
00:11:32.840statistically speaking and most of their money comes from taxpayers um but they're allowed the
00:11:37.640profit like like they're making 30 million dollars a year yeah top executives are yeah
00:11:42.220boeing lockheed general dynamics north of grumman lockheed martin wow might have said that already
00:11:49.240But then a portion of that revenue is recycled back into the political system through lobbying, through campaign contributions, and through an underrated method of influence is the funding of think tanks in Washington, D.C.
00:12:05.620Which gives them, who produce reports that are not, you know, objectively PR material, but they fall within a certain spectrum that is allowable for the arms industry.
00:12:46.600of course um and it develops iran war cost estimates in an intelligent way either we
00:12:55.000their research is actually well grounded but they will sound the alarm when it comes to
00:13:03.080war costs related to u.s munitions expenditures so raising that alarm and again it's just
00:13:10.200justifiably so the us has burned an enormous amount of munitions in iran
00:13:13.560that helps create a demand to buy more weapons as the war itself has but they will also
00:13:23.400it's like you need new toner cartridges yes yes you've bought the hardware but the actual profit
00:13:31.740is on the toner cartridges the oil changes the munitions yeah stuff that you have to keep buying
00:13:36.520and they really uh and my main pet peeve in this sort of national security intellectualism that
00:13:43.140happens in D.C. is they turn political problems into technocratic or technical problems waiting
00:13:50.220to be solved. So the U.S. is experiencing a shortfall in missile interceptors. Interceptors
00:13:55.180are missiles that shoot down other missiles. Yes. Everyone, I think, is aware of it at this point.
00:14:00.180But the U.S. has burned such vast quantities of these interceptors during the Iran war that has
00:14:05.380created a shortfall and subsequently a PR nightmare for the Trump administration and the people in
00:14:12.940congress who support the war now um the obvious solution to the interceptor problem is to look at
00:14:21.460the main cause of why we've run low in the first place which is the war instead we're getting these
00:14:28.000very so pointless wars are tough on your munition stockpile is that what you're saying tucker it
00:14:32.140turns out that that to be the case i know this is shocking to some people but we're getting these
00:14:35.80012 do you have a phd how'd you know that oh yeah yeah i just yeah it's just years of intensive
00:14:41.060study but the important is like people who do have phds are developing these you know 20 page
00:14:46.060reports on how to replenish the stockpiles but not really calling for an explicit end to the
00:14:50.540iran war so they're just saying really tinkering around with like oh uh production schedules and
00:14:56.100yeah like how can we increase the yearly yearly production capacity from the projected 650
00:15:02.300patriot interceptors in fiscal year 2027 to get it to 750 and how do we invest in the solid rocket
00:15:10.000supplier base and how do we get the critical minerals we need to accelerate production?
00:15:15.540What are you talking about? We have a problem that is caused by war. And if your first
00:15:20.680recommendation isn't to stop that war, I just can't take that seriously. So that's the kind of
00:15:27.160analysis you get when even when it comes to like a very narrow subject, like rebuilding the
00:15:32.920inventory. So this is part of their lobbying budget. Like Lockheed, for example, it's just
00:15:37.840To pick one, would spend, you know, it's the money it gets from the government building the weapons that it has sold to the government, of course, and employing its workforce and all that.
00:15:48.900But then part of the money would go to lobbying either directly or influence campaigns laundered through so-called think tanks.
00:15:59.620One thing that I've tracked over the years, and this is like, I run this newsletter called Polygraph on Substack, and one of the main things that I do is I state the obvious, but in a very, very specific way.
00:16:13.380So, for example, for every military budget that Congress votes on every year, I compare the yes and no votes and I compare how much each respective vote category took from arms industry donors before voting.
00:16:29.640and lo and behold as you're totally unsurprised to hear is that the members of congress who
00:16:35.940receive more money from arms companies military contractors are more likely to vote for the
00:16:43.160military budget and military budget increases oh wow really yeah so there's cause and effect
00:16:48.300there's at least a correlation and i i when people say duh i said yeah i'm not surprised either but
00:16:56.460You know, when we talk about money in politics, the first answer, like people say, oh, like everyone knows that it's a problem.
00:17:03.900But, you know, you approach a certain politicians about it and they say, oh, it doesn't affect my vote.
00:17:08.640It's like here, if every year I'm noticing that members of Congress who vote for a military spending increase take three to five times more arms industry cash than members opposed to military spending increases, then we've moved the conversation away.
00:17:24.080we're suddenly, for people who care about the effect of money in politics, we're suddenly now
00:17:29.920on the offensive. Because now members of Congress have to say, okay, this correlation exists now.
00:17:35.080So, and you're part of this group who on average takes three to five times more money from the
00:17:42.460companies that profit from war and you've just voted for a record amount of military spending.
00:17:46.820Well, yeah, especially considering the use of these weapons. I mean, it's one thing if we're
00:17:51.020defending the homeland against a ground invasion from paraguay or something or any you know defend
00:17:56.460the home and got it fine but these are like totally pointless wars disconnected from america's
00:18:01.400national interest in which unarmed civilians kids get killed because why it right there's like no
00:18:08.600justification for any of it it's like repulsive yeah morally i i mean i'm not gonna i don't claim
00:18:17.200be a moral authority i can tell you how much it costs though i can tell you as someone who's
00:18:21.040followed these costs it's incredibly taxing on the conscience well can i just ask too unless
00:18:26.320i'm misunderstanding you're saying that some of these maybe all these weapons manufacturers derive
00:18:33.120most of their income and profits from the taxpayer the major ones yes for example lockheed martin
00:18:40.800last year a couple years ago received i think uh 73 percent of its income from dod contracts
00:18:46.320and then even more from U.S. government
00:21:13.720And through this process called it, it's either called like political engineering or geographic engineering, that these arms companies deliberately spread out their assets to touch, quote unquote, all as many congressional districts as possible.
00:21:27.120So when lobbyists, say, get together to keep afloat a dying and deeply fraudulent project like the littoral combat ship, which was eventually just killed off in the last couple of years.
00:21:43.960But in the early teens, it had a huge problematic history and there was this huge lobbying effort in the mid-20 teens to keep funding going to this very problematic ship.
00:21:57.600Even though it had tons of technical flaws, there was literally a crack developing in the hulls of these ships because they were made of aluminum and not steel.
00:22:07.280And this massive amount of technical problems that this ship was just never going to deliver and is obvious.
00:22:12.620but there's this huge lobbying effort where a group of lobbyists organized this lobbying effort
00:22:17.420where um i'm going to slip into the first person here because i was a part of this lobbying effort
00:22:24.540where we organized all of the suppliers the contractors and the subcontractors involved
00:22:30.700in the production of this um what john mccain called the little crappy ship the lcs and we just
00:22:37.260developed a map in this huge spreadsheet of all the different areas that um projects were related
00:22:44.060to and how many people had employed so when we went to congressional offices to lobby for this
00:22:49.340project there was eventually like in the white paper that we provided like a you know a some
00:22:55.900sort of national security justification usually that we just grabbed from an arms industry funded
00:23:00.220think tank and then but the real line was like okay and at the bottom was just like and by the
00:23:05.580the way it this this uh this company employs 550 people in your district well anyone who uses cozy
00:23:11.940earth will tell you the exact same thing it's been a game changer it's wild the night's getting
00:23:17.940cooler creating an extremely comfortable space on your bed and couch is a very good thing cozy
00:23:23.780earth is here to make it happen their bubble cuddle blanket precisely what it sounds like
00:23:28.120how could you not sleep well in one of those it's really hard not to sleep well in fact your kids
00:23:32.880might wind up physically fighting over gets to use it,
00:26:24.040It increased under the first term of Obama, then it went down.
00:26:27.480But pretty much since 2015 or 2016, the military budget has gone upward pretty much every year, even after accounting for inflation.
00:26:35.540So basically everything Eisenhower warned about has come true.
00:26:39.960The defense industrial establishment has just eaten the country.
00:26:44.220Yeah, Eisenhower was worried about basically the war machine becoming sentient.
00:26:47.520Like this collection of interests would sort of not necessarily like execute corruption in kind of like the, you know, backfilled, you know, smoke-filled rooms and cash on the table, although that happens.
00:27:02.280But it's more about like creating the conditions where Capitol Hill is just operating in its own world.
00:27:09.000It's insulated from the interests of everyone else.
00:27:10.880And when, you know, ideologies are here to say, we've all got ideologies, you and I have them, of course.
00:27:18.120But when you start mixing in profit interests to decisions about especially war and peace and people's security, I have a bit of a problem with that.
00:27:53.240And it's one of these cases that we're going to hear this more and more from Trump administration officials like Pete Hegseth, for example, that, oh, it's Congress that's not letting us win the war.
00:28:04.740We haven't even accomplished the military objectives that were laid out.0.95
00:28:07.920Like Iran is still able to project power across its borders. Like congrats, you've beat up on a country that has the GDP of Kentucky or Illinois or something like that. But it controls the Strait of Hormuz for the most part. It's still able to project power outside of its borders.0.96
00:28:24.060And whenever the cost of the Iran war is brought up in any sense, the rebuttal is,0.68
00:28:31.220okay, well, this war is about preventing Iran from getting the nuclear weapon.
00:28:35.720So, you know, how much would you pay for Iran to not have the nuclear weapon?
00:28:42.180It's patently absurd because one, it requires someone to believe that this war won't actually
00:28:49.400make Iran's interest in acquiring a nuclear weapon more likely.0.88
00:28:53.220Which I think it would. I mean, if I were them, I mean, it would definitely heighten my interest to acquire one.0.99
00:28:58.120Iran's getting a nuke. And by the end of this, there'll be nothing we can do about it.0.97
00:29:02.260Right. And maybe at that point, we'll find it in ourselves to actually be honest negotiators to negotiate, you know, an arms control agreement.
00:29:11.160But we had a war in June of 2025 that we were told ended their capacity to create nuclear weapons.
00:29:19.340And of course, those of us who are watching carefully knew it had nothing to do with nuclear weapons and neither did the subsequent regime change effort that followed it.
00:29:27.100All of it was a lie, nothing to do with Iran's nuclear weapons.
00:29:29.620They didn't have a nuclear program that was close to producing a nuclear weapon and they didn't have the means to deliver it.
00:29:37.820There's really a reliance on the Trump administration and Trump administration officials to.
00:29:43.300it's a performative war in a sense where people aren't expected to gauge success or failure based
00:29:51.820on on political outcomes but just actions that the u.s takes like for pete hegseth he expects
00:29:59.960people to just be enamored with the use of force and violence and derive some sort of you know
00:30:06.080value from it or entertainment when people are most people are morally opposed to that sort of
00:30:16.020thing unless it's absolutely absolutely necessary and actively undermining their material interests
00:30:22.240at home because this war is it's for the average person it's it's it's morally repugnant it's
00:30:31.960It's a betrayal of the campaign promises that Trump ran on, and it's also just in a material sense making their lives worse, both as a consumer because they're paying for higher gas prices and higher prices for everything as a result of the inflationary war spike, but also as taxpayers as well because they're on the hook for the bill that the Trump administration is about to send to taxpayers for the war.
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00:35:23.740at least publicly, is a summary table,
00:35:25.860which left a lot of stuff out didn't count the cost of replacing bases for example it didn't
00:35:32.700count the cost of moving money around in the pentagon budget to pay for war operations that
00:35:38.480would have gone to something else or have would have gone unused so that has opened up the space
00:35:43.140for um independent analysts to uh assess the cost of the iran war and for the first 60 days of the
00:35:52.220one war, I estimated that it cost $72 billion in direct costs between operations, between
00:35:57.840replacing the munitions that were expended, damage to U.S. military bases, and military aid to
00:36:04.200Israel. So taking those costs into account, I arrived at $72 billion for the first 60 days.
00:36:12.300Then the next month, the Trump administration requested an $87 billion supplemental funding
00:36:21.660bill, which is literally money supplemental to the main budget that Congress approves
00:36:27.520every year, mostly for Iran war-related expenses.
00:36:31.920And according to the Cato Institute and others, people who have read the bill, the number
00:36:36.280I arrived at, it also included $72 billion for war-related costs.
00:36:41.120And then for the next estimate I had for 120 days, I arrived at $103 billion.
00:36:48.980And then a week later, there were two reports from NBC and Wired that internal Pentagon estimates had the war at around 100 billion as well.
00:37:01.080So by this point, I'm feeling very pleased with myself because I had a number that was then corroborated with the amount that the administration requested for the war.
00:37:11.500And then that was coming from internal Pentagon assessments through just the rank and file people who do the budget work there.
00:37:18.980But then last month or in September, the Congressional Budget Office came out with their report on the cost of the Iran war, and they arrived at $38 billion, an extremely low number.
00:38:28.320That number came from a Congressional Research Service report published in May that had that number, 24 losses.
00:38:34.080But that report was based on a report from CBS, from an unnamed U.S. official, from the first week of April regarding U.S. war losses.
00:38:44.180So effectively, the CBO, for their official war cost estimate, or part of it, took a number of, for the number of drone losses, took a five-week estimate for their five-month estimate.
00:38:57.140So, what should the number of drone losses should be for MQ-9s?
00:39:03.580If you compare the total aircraft inventory for the Air Force, total aircraft inventory is this list that's published each year as part of the Air Force budget request.
00:39:14.120They give the amount that was enacted, their enacted inventory, the number of aircraft they have in each fleet for each respective unit, the amount they have enacted for that year, plus the amount that they want to have active for next year.
00:39:26.940In June 2025, as part of their 2026 request, the Pentagon said it would have 189 MQ-9 drones in its inventory at the end of fiscal year 2026.
00:39:44.120The next year, this past April, they said that therefore said that the enacted amount was down to 165.
00:39:52.260So that explains the 24 drone difference.
00:39:55.380But in May, an Air Force general testified before a Senate subcommittee and said that the MQ-9 fleet, due to wartime losses, was down to 135, or roughly 135.
00:40:10.200So either way, we're looking at an estimate for, at least for MQ-9 drones, that is 100% off.
00:40:17.860It should have been twice as much as it was.
00:40:19.720did anybody else so so cbo comes congressional budget office comes out with this 38 billion
00:40:26.820dollar estimate for the cost of war and it's of course dutifully repeated by every new
00:40:32.400organization i mean that's the point of cbo numbers is to get reporters to tell the public
00:40:37.500that they're real did anybody reverse engineer it like you did to my knowledge no right so you're
00:40:43.480just like one guy in pittsburgh is like let's look at how they got to this number and you find
00:40:47.320And it's 100% off just in this one category, one kind of drone.
00:40:51.860And I should say that for the most part, CBO and I were working with the same amount of resources.
00:40:57.180Because as CBO notes in its report, the Pentagon didn't cooperate with their estimates.
00:41:03.740So CBO asked for numbers from the Pentagon, but the Pentagon just refused to provide those numbers.
00:41:07.740Oh, is it its own country? It gets to act independently?
00:41:11.520And from people I talked to on the Hill, it's that the Pentagon, I got two types of answers.
00:41:17.760One was that the Pentagon does this all the time.
00:41:20.020And the second version was the Pentagon has done this in the past and it's also worse than it's ever been in terms of stonewalling other agencies from accessing the data.
00:41:26.980So Congress is just like in full cuck mode, like no self-respect whatsoever.
00:41:31.300The Pentagon has never passed an audit.
00:41:32.840I mean, federal agencies were required in the mid-90s to pass an audit to be able to produce accurate financial documents.
00:41:40.020And in the private sector, you go to a CEO of a private sector firm who does not produce accurate financial records goes to prison.
00:41:48.320So I'm thinking, why not have the same standards for the heads of government agencies?
00:41:53.920Well, but also the only enforcement mechanism really is the legislative branch, the Congress, the co-equal branch of government, one of three.
00:42:01.160And if they don't assert that privilege, if they don't use their power, then it just goes away.
00:42:25.240I mean, CBO, again, under their list of equipment losses, it didn't include an MH-60 helicopter that crashed in the Arabian Sea as part of the Iran war operations in early July.
00:42:36.260understandable though it didn't make headlines it actually did make headlines i mean that the
00:42:41.340crash i mean made headlines like one of the crew members died and there's a search for him it's
00:42:45.540you know not just you know independent media i mean it was covered by independent media was
00:42:49.600covered in new york times as well you know major organizations as well so it got enough press
00:42:54.480attention i just detected a just a level of effort that i wasn't really happy with it also refused to
00:43:02.440assign a cost to the bases that are now, you know, in some cases beyond repair that the U.S.
00:43:11.700has basically lost and abandoned in the Middle East. We're told that, you know, not to complain
00:43:16.180about war costs for maintaining this, you know, this archipelago of bases across the Middle East.
00:43:23.880We're told it's in the interest of our security and that not to complain about the cost of
00:43:27.720maintaining them and conducting operations from them
00:43:29.920because it provides immeasurable economic benefits.
00:44:52.980You obviously want to separate the peacetime costs that would have been incurred anyway with the additional costs from the war. Fair enough. I get that. And I do that too in my own estimates. The problem is it matters a lot which budget and which funding baseline you choose to represent, you know, the peacetime budget.
00:45:13.100So when CBO made its calculation, it was able to write off huge amount of costs because they were, quote unquote, already included in the DOD budget.
00:45:23.700And you can see this throughout the report.
00:45:27.360But the amount of money in the DOD budget is the historical amount we were just talking about, that $1.1 trillion.
00:50:55.480Maybe that's a constraint by CBO that they have to abide by the most recent fiscal year funding projections.
00:51:03.780And if it happens to be the largest military budget since World War II, then okay, so be it.
00:51:08.920But I'm just saying that because of that choice, I just feel like their estimate is detached from reality because they're more concerned about abiding to their budget model, which I think was disconnected from reality.
00:51:24.760so if you're spending that much money in an agency that has never passed an audit as you said
00:51:31.400and there's no obvious sign of what you're getting at all like it's not like you're paying
00:51:39.060a world war ii size military because we're not the military like the number of personnel is
00:51:44.080lower yeah and the quality is obviously lower in some ways you could be paying for a lot of stuff
00:51:51.920that people would have no idea even existed.
00:52:21.920And they claim that, oh, we're able to account for a slightly higher percentage of our assets and our budgetary resources than the year before.
00:52:30.200But the number, the value of the assets they're unable to account for increases every year because their budget goes up.
00:52:36.960So even if they make progress in terms of the percentage of their budget they're able to account for, the objective resources that they're just cannot provide proper documentation for keeps going up.
00:52:50.220Do you remember the last time an American general officer went to jail for corruption?
00:52:57.120Have you ever heard of that happening?
00:58:29.640so it's like the cost of these just it's it spirals so quickly and these are you know budgetary costs
00:58:35.260as well we're again we're not measuring i mean some people are measuring um and rightfully so
00:58:40.700the cost to consumers so it's like the cost i was just discussing was the cost to us as taxpayers
00:58:46.700but not the cost of consumers so you know it's kind of a double whammy as far as you do for the
00:58:52.440country with that much money like maybe it wouldn't be falling apart like it is uh yeah uh you could
00:58:59.100pretty much could we have nice airports yeah you i mean the possibilities are pretty much endless
00:59:05.480like to like to end you know extreme poverty for a year or you know it's like a fraction of that
00:59:13.880it's just it's very very shocking whenever um a project is proposed that regardless of what it
00:59:22.540does if it promises to make the world better you have to have an enormous amount of research
00:59:27.120and cost analysis and all this stuff backing it up and you have to you know survive you have to
00:59:33.720get it through congress there's tons of you know political effort that sort of thing rarely does
00:59:38.700you know happen but if you're in the you know arms industry what you're promising is
00:59:46.860the absence of catastrophe you're basically saying this has to happen for the sake of national
00:59:52.720security and as a result there's just not enough there's just not that much interest or inquiry of
00:59:58.820whether this stuff actually these purchases this money and the stuff that it buys actually does
01:00:04.880what it says because it's preventing a catastrophe instead of you don't know how bad it could have
01:00:09.480been yeah and it could have been jihadis in bed with you like they could be beheading you right
01:00:15.080now yeah if we hadn't done what we did yeah so please say thank you exactly exactly and if that
01:00:21.360If that weapon system that we said is protecting you gets destroyed in the Iran war, you can't say it costs anything because it's already in our budget.
01:00:30.320If you want a $3,000 a month payday for life, what would you feel free to do?
01:00:35.220Maybe take a long weekend every weekend or try a bunch of new hobbies?
01:00:39.600Would you feel free to upgrade and listen ad-free?
01:04:54.620So when we talk about the military that's provided each year, the number, there's $3.3 billion provided through the State Department budget for what is called foreign military financing.
01:05:07.420It's basically a gift card for Israel and other countries as well to spend on U.S. weapons.
01:05:11.660Israel is uniquely allowed to spend some money on its own, buying weapons from its own agency using U.S. taxpayer dollars.
01:05:17.380The U.S. government gives money to Israel, and Israel uses that money to buy weapons from American or Israeli manufacturers, and we say that's good for the U.S. economy.
01:05:40.140If you're interested in creating jobs through public funds, through taxpayer dollars, if you want to get the most bang for your buck, you do pretty much anything besides military spending.
01:05:51.840It's the absolute worst way to create jobs.
01:07:25.600And then another part is just factors that affected every industry that led to the decline of manufacturing in the U.S., but also profit-driven interests as well.
01:07:36.560Well, they want arms, arms company's main concern is profit so that when that's their main concern, they're interested in cutting down the workforce as much as possible while still maintaining enough of a presence in congressional districts where they're able to say they create jobs.
01:07:53.340but it's just through these cost-saving measures to boost profit and technological advances that
01:08:01.920affected every sector in terms of employment in arms industry employment the relationship between
01:08:07.400military spending and and economic benefit is very very shaky it sounds inverse so well yeah
01:08:16.540And it's also a sign when you hear that, oh, this creates jobs, okay, that's a tacit admission that their main justification, which is national security, which is, you know, security is, you know, it's the one thing that people can't do without.
01:09:56.800So when you count military aid, and military aid is most of that $352 billion, $360 billion I just talked about, military aid is a category that refers to a narrow set of goods and services provided to another country, training, equipment, for the most part.
01:10:13.240Actually, for the exclusive part, pretty much.
01:10:14.580It doesn't include literally assisting a country militarily.
01:10:18.940So I just crunched the numbers on the how many.
01:12:08.020That was the next number that was mentioned, actually.
01:12:09.840So it said more than 200,000 and then more than 100 of these standard missiles, which include the standard missile three and then the standard missile six, which operate at lower altitudes.
01:12:22.800Actually, they actually the U.S. has employed four types since October 23 to defend Israel.
01:12:29.060And they are the SM3, which are $31 million each for fiscal year 2027.
01:12:37.920For any fact checkers at home that first do FY27, discretionary cost, unit flyaway recurring cost, just, you know, just for any fact checkers out there.
01:12:48.180Basically anyone who's podantic about the numbers like I am.
01:12:50.960So you have this about $30 million interceptor called the SM-3, which is the only one that the U.S. has to make space-based interceptions.
01:13:00.100So ballistic missiles launch, they go through like a one to five minute boost phase, they leave the Earth's atmosphere, they travel in space for a bit, like 20 minutes or so, and then they come crashing down in like a minute or two window called the terminal phase.
01:13:15.100And then the middle part is called the mid-course phase.
01:13:16.980it's tech you have the most opportunities in the mid-course phase because it's about 20 minutes
01:13:23.140long it's the longest of the three phases the problem is you need an interceptor that's capable
01:13:28.840that's technologically advanced to reach outer space and intercept the missile in it and also
01:13:34.220it's if you're able in outer space the ballistic missile is able to release decoys chaff and
01:13:42.920balloons because without resistance from the the earth's atmosphere they just travel along at the
01:13:47.660same they basically travel in this cloud of debris and it's at the same trajectory as the missile
01:13:52.620itself which makes it you know extremely difficult to you know separate the wheat from the chaff as
01:13:57.500it were so the u.s is fired um during the june 2025 or fired 80 of these things at around 30
01:14:07.180million dollars a pop that was just during the june 2025 war and then they didn't the the post
01:14:12.580didn't give a breakdown between that and the other standard missile but it's been over 100 combined
01:14:19.180how many of those 30 in the first war the last summer war uh were fired in defense of israel
01:14:26.260so there's uh there's 80 launch 80 sm3s launched in defense of israel uh during the june 2025 war
01:14:35.520and then uh more than 150 fads also launched in defensive israel during that war so if you include
01:14:43.440that number all the all the intercepts uh recorded intercepts uh documented use of these interceptors
01:14:51.440that the us has used for just not in defense of its own bases but for the sole purpose of
01:14:57.360defense of israel since october 2023 through september 2026 so three years you get 609
01:15:05.520I've never received a thank you note or really any expression of gratitude from anyone in that government.
01:15:10.060Not doing enough, really. That's what we're told.
01:15:16.920And actually, J.D. Vance actually had a slip up where he was kind of shook from whatever brainwashing happened to him.
01:15:25.560But he kind of had an outburst where a reporter asked him about U.S. support for Israel.
01:15:31.560And he corroborated the Washington Post report where the numbers I just mentioned, the more than 200 that and the more than 100 standard missiles were about two thirds of all interceptors fired for defense of Israel.
01:15:45.620So that includes Israeli interceptors as well.
01:15:47.680So the U.S. shouldered around two thirds of the missile defense burden for Israel during the 2026 war and close to 70 percent during the 2025 war.
01:15:57.800and that i'm not factoring in the 500 million dollars in missile defense aid the u.s
01:16:03.540has provided every year for israel to buy those interceptors its own interceptors
01:16:09.320i haven't crunched those numbers yet i was hoping to have it ready for the show it just takes
01:16:12.880forever man um that is just absolutely remarkable yeah and i um wait so 350 billion since its
01:16:26.280founding for a tiny country i mean that's the largest i mean is there any it's unfair to ask
01:16:33.560you this uh having not asked you to prepare for it but like is i mean that's got to be the biggest
01:16:39.160source of income to the economy right over time there's no oil and gas there as far as it's it's
01:16:45.640the largest cumulative amount the u.s has provided any other country i'm ever out of all countries
01:16:51.240yeah yeah yeah and as far as waging war on another country's behalf i mean there's really
01:16:57.320three costs that i've only i've only really done two i'm still calculating you know the the so
01:17:03.720there's army in israel the the aid that we just talked about and then there's you know directly
01:17:09.560defending israel through the middle missile interceptors i just talked about i'm realizing
01:17:13.480now that i didn't include um interceptions of iranian drones and houthi missiles too i have to0.68
01:17:20.840to calculate that shit so i have to calculate those costs as well and then there's the cost of0.79
01:17:25.820just waging war on israel's behalf because this really is i mean you i don't think there's any0.99
01:17:33.060one thing any one reason the u.s went to war but it strategically speaking like this war doesn't
01:17:39.460happen without israel and without israel's influence over the u.s government and marco
01:17:43.480rubio said it out loud yeah yeah we followed israel into this and by the way the speaker of
01:17:48.980house mike johnson also said that and it's also true because i saw it so maybe you support it
01:17:54.980maybe you think that's great maybe you don't but that's just a fact that it cannot be erased yeah
01:17:59.620it's for this it's it's not for us interest it's not america first no which i which i still think
01:18:06.340it hasn't been implemented obviously as we've as we've painfully found out um but
01:18:12.660i still think that idea has a good amount of currency america first yeah of course if
01:18:18.340implemented properly you're talking about you know it's called democracy that's what democracy
01:18:23.320is no it's democracy you serve on behalf of the citizens of your country they own the country
01:18:28.060i just caught myself over intellectual i was in that thanks for no but it's like it's the only
01:18:33.040legitimate basis of government in any system including a monarchy if a king rules on behalf
01:18:39.100of another kingdom he's betraying his subjects lots of kings no american wants to hear it lots
01:18:44.200kings are super popular actually yeah yeah some are not but some do a good job and they're really
01:18:49.020popular and people who live there don't want to replace the king why is he popular because they
01:18:53.280think he's serving their interests he's kuwait first or you know emirates first or whatever but
01:18:59.820it's that's the only legitimate way to run a country or a family or a military or a business0.96
01:19:24.660Yeah, but you still have to, you know, answer to people and, you know, pay attention to what people think.
01:19:28.980But with ruling, yeah, you can just, you know, wage wars on a country's behalf.
01:19:32.140You can direct funding to the exact companies you want for all intents and purposes, you can.
01:19:37.040Well, then you have to ask, like, who's actually being oppressed here?
01:19:40.940You know, is it the, are we doing this to liberate the long-suffering people of Iran or Russia or Vietnam or name your country, Somalia, all these countries we've gone to war against or within their borders?
01:19:53.760And it's like, you know, I hope for liberation for everyone, but I see the American public as being oppressed by everything that you mentioned.
01:20:01.800I think workers across the world are being oppressed. I really think one of the main political conflicts going on now is the workers versus the war profiteers and the warmongers.
01:20:15.340I really think it's, I mean, you can define working class how you like, but I mean, regardless of your definition, if you're even just vaguely within the bounds of reality, you recognize that working class well-being is acutely compromised when governments prioritize waging warfare over promoting the general welfare as it were.
01:20:39.640And if you're not putting workers' interests first
01:22:52.580And I think that's kind of, it harkens back to this actual, it harkens back to this quote I had or I heard during the 2024 election where it's like, young people don't see real hope.
01:23:03.540They just see a dying empire led by bad people.
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01:25:04.960I will get yelled at for if I bring up, you know, polling on Gaza in the 2024 election and how big of an effect it had on Kamala Harris's loss.
01:25:14.920I will be told in like in by someone who will say, oh, Gaza didn't matter at all.
01:25:20.660Or in in like the next breath, sometimes from the same person, it says, oh, well, the people who didn't vote in 2024 because of Gaza got what they deserved.
01:25:29.980So, you know, a president they didn't want, I guess.
01:25:31.860so it kind of occupies these two spaces where critics of of people people who criticize other
01:25:42.300people who have made gaza have decided that gaza matters to them on electoral level that it'll
01:25:47.040affect their judgment and their vote and their voting behavior that it it i it oscillates between
01:25:52.360this is the most important issue or this is the issue that doesn't it was a non-factor completely
01:25:57.880So people just really can't decide. But I think it did matter. I think this and the polling I just mentioned and a bunch of other polls suggested it didn't matter too. But I think it's also the interaction between putting another country, especially one committing war crimes on a near daily basis, ahead of the interests of people.
01:26:20.260And I think this is where this intersection between the cost of war and the cost of living crisis, they meet.
01:26:25.480Because it's not just the financial resources being dumped in, it's the political capital too.
01:34:46.040And you can see the historical foundation there, like a buildup over time where it's like this longstanding support for Israel, this, you know, repeating these actions.0.61
01:34:57.300Yeah, because it was just, you know, it's kind of like it became white noise to a point.
01:35:01.580They had, I spoke at the Republican convention 2024 for Trump the night he was inaugurated.
01:35:08.340And I was, of course, I've had a lot of time to think about that in the last six months since Trump has done things that I, like, so offensive to me, I can't even control myself.
01:41:51.040Karim MacDisi and his brothers who have the podcast called MacDisi Street. Karim MacDisi was a professor at AUB. I think he still is. American University of Beirut. Right, where I was. Excellent resource. UN Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese. Nice woman. Have you met her? Yeah. Oh, cool. Cool. That's probably actually one person. I was just extremely excited to meet her.
01:42:21.040Nora Erekat as well, who's a law professor at Rutgers, I believe.
01:42:25.420Those are just a couple off the top of my head.
01:42:27.400But I mean, there's a lot of, there's a really a hell of a lot of people doing good work on this.
01:42:32.720It's just, I've just, I've thought about Gaza pretty much every day for the last three years.