Erik Prince - War Will Never Be The Same
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 14 minutes
Words per Minute
165.93309
Summary
In this episode, we talk to Eric Eddings about the rapid development of AI and the impact it can have on our ability to fight and win wars. We discuss the impact of the revolution in Ukraine, the rapid growth in drones and missiles, and the implications for the future of warfare.
Transcript
00:00:01.000
What is the state of the Western world and its defenses at the moment?
00:00:08.000
The revolution and war that's happened in Ukraine,
00:00:11.000
the acceleration with extremely cheap guided weapons,
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all the legacy systems are much less useful in largely just targets.
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So it's democratized precision strike to everyone.
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When there's troops in contact in a valley in Afghanistan
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and they have to call and talk to a lawyer 2,000 miles away for permission to drop a bomb,
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Not one flag officer, all the super polished generals,
00:00:46.000
which are now serving on boards and hedge funds and universities and all the rest.
00:00:53.000
They were entrusted with our troops lives with hundreds of billions of dollars.
00:01:00.000
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00:01:07.000
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00:01:12.000
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00:01:16.000
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00:01:23.000
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Listen, the first question we wanted to ask you,
00:01:36.000
something that we in Europe are increasingly concerned about,
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which is what is the state of the Western world and its defenses at the moment?
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I would say they're massively behind the criticism that Trump had in the first administration of only five of the 28 NATO countries actually spending 2% of their GDP on defense is even more stark now.
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Even though that number I think is 11 or 12 of the 28 are spending 2%, but the revolution and war that's happened in Ukraine, the acceleration with extremely cheap guided weapons,
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whether it's a cheap drone, cheap missile, long range missiles, etc.
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Everything that the explosion of that AI on the edge on that individual device and its ability to guide targets has largely rendered billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of installed legacy military equipment largely useless or really just targets.
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So talk to us more about that, because the vast majority of the people who watch our show and frankly, us, too, are not military experts.
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So you say the revolution that's happened in this way, the drones we've seen, but tell us more about it.
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You say it's made things obsolete. Is the tank useless now?
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So the first strategic offset the U.S. had against the Soviet Union in the 50s and 60s was nuclear strike.
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And then it became a big contest of who could throw more tons.
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And then it shifted towards precision delivery, precision weapons.
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And you saw that in the first Gulf War. You saw that in 2003 in the invasion of Iraq.
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Aircraft from 25,000 feet putting a bomb through the window of a building.
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You can carry six of them that you can fly through the window of a building from 15 kilometers away.
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So it's democratized precision strike to everyone.
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And what that means is that anything that can be located on the battlefield, a tank, infantry on the move, a vehicle, is immediately targetable by dozens of different weapons systems.
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So it's made survivability extremely difficult.
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And you can't almost carry enough armor to protect yourself.
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So you either have to deal with speed or extreme stealth again.
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No, it's different because there are so many weapons that can be sent at it.
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And it's even made precision weapons much, much cheaper.
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For example, a Javelin missile, which the U.S. has provided to the Ukrainians.
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It's $200,000 for the launcher, $150,000 a shot.
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The Ukrainians make a, I would argue, a better one for $29,000.
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But now you can take a small drone that can carry a charge about this size and you put it together for a few hundred dollars.
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You have a $500 drone, some better software for it with a charge and you're at two grand and you can kill a target out to 15 kilometers away.
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That's what I'm talking about, that revolution, that acceleration.
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So all the legacy systems are much less useful and largely just targets.
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And the obvious question then is who's got the, who's a step ahead on that stuff?
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If you shot at the Russians with artillery two years ago, it would take them an hour and a half to shoot back.
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And now they're shooting back in two to three minutes.
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So their communications, their, their radars, which link, which literally look and spot the incoming round and do the telemetry back to its point of origin to shoot back on.
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They have, you know, don't listen to the idiot U.S. politicians that say, oh, we're, you know, wiping out the Russian army.
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No, the Russian army is much better, smarter and more lethal today than that, than it was two years ago.
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Ukrainians have also learned and had to, to survive.
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But now it's really a battle of, it's a war of attrition and math matters.
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And the fact that the Russians can throw more bodies and we'll do a general mobilization is a big problem for the Ukrainians.
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But I mean, on a technological level, in terms of the technology, the drones, the AI, the software, is the West, have we got the good stuff or is it other people have got the good stuff?
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The China has certainly become a significant supplier of the Russian war machine, of the components to make up those drones, of the propellants needed to make the artillery rounds, etc.
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I mean, look, the war has largely, not frozen, but it's really more of a trench warfare kind of thing because every, both sides have so much precision weaponry that any breakthrough can immediately be targeted by that many more systems.
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Now you can even have drones that will deliver landmines ahead of a, of a convoy of tanks.
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Um, the advantage the Chinese have is an enormous industrial base.
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I think it's important for, for the American audience to remember, we think, wow, you know, we won the war in World War II.
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Um, we lost 250,000, um, men in the European theater of operations, 250,000.
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And while we were still messing around in North Africa, uh, in Morocco and Tunisia, the Russians had erased 800,000 men from the German order of battle at Stalingrad.
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But what made it possible for the Russians to win was to mechanize their forces.
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And that came from 600,000 vehicles from Detroit.
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And thousands and thousands of aircraft and ships and logistics supply.
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The U.S. industrial base is a hollow fraction of what it was back then.
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And that's where the biggest, uh, most obvious deficit is now.
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So that would suggest that what we're in now is a world where, almost like in World War II, where we have these superpowers who are competing with one another for dominance.
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Um, look, there's always been a, uh, a competition for, for land, for trade dominance.
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That's, that's, that's as old as people throwing sticks at each other.
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But, um, uh, the, the, the free trade agreements that hollowed out the U.S. industrial base and moved that industrial base to China is certainly shown to not be an advantage to the United States or, or for Europe, for that matter.
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And in both cases, the military industrial complex in the United States and in Europe has not done any favors by always trying to offer the most exquisite, most expensive, unique thing instead of the practical thing that actually lasts and works in battle.
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Like I talk about the $150,000 Raytheon missile versus the $29,000 Ukrainian missile.
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Um, ultimately war is a battle of math as well and what's affordable.
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And, and the U S literally shoots itself out of missiles in the first 10 days maximum of full on state on state combat.
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And that's just, it's just, it's just an asinine position to be in.
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Do you think part of that is because as with, you know, the NHS in this country where they're, they're overcharged for basic products, the private companies simply wouldn't countenance paying that amount of money for.
00:09:09.000
So the U S army gets overcharged continually for basic things.
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Uh, it's, it comes down to a lack of competition amongst the supply base.
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So in the nineties, the U S or the Clinton administration kind of pushed a consolidation of our defense industry from about a hundred defense contractors down to five.
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And so that five for the last few decades has behaved like a cartel, uh, with less and less competition, uh, kind of a clubby approach to bidding.
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And with the, with the demonstrable failed results.
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And so antitrust that works across all industries, whether it's in railways or airlines or banking certainly has to apply in defense as well.
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And I would say even by leapfrog that there's a lot of great innovation happening at the small and midsize level, award more contracts to them and let those guys build and run hard to catch up because, um, big and bloated is, um, it embodies all the bad habits and, uh, it'll be hard for them to unlearn that.
00:10:16.000
And that puts the U S in a very fragile position because of one thing you don't want to be, well, you don't want anything to be big and bloated.
00:10:23.840
But above all, you don't want your military to be big and bloated because it needs to be nimble and agile, particularly when you're fighting in territories, which are not your own.
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Particularly when, when the most expensive weapon system in human history, the F 35 has an operational readiness rate of 29%, 29%.
00:10:42.500
Come on, that's, that's bad because you have so many soul sourced.
00:10:49.580
Uh, because there's people going to be listening to us who go out of a hundred aircraft.
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If I say, jock up, we're going to war right now, 29 are ready to fly at fully mission capable.
00:11:04.340
Maintenance, vendor issues, software issues, over sophistication.
00:11:10.160
Um, and just, um, uh, they, they've had some that they produced that they couldn't do software upgrades to.
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So the military is not even taking them and they're parked forever.
00:11:22.420
It's like, uh, Frankenstein's monster because they expected this aircraft to not just do air force, air superiority, but also to have it landed aircraft carrier.
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And all the Marine Corps wanted one that could take off and land vertically.
00:11:33.900
So they expect all this out of one aircraft and it's an impossibly overpriced mass.
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Again, the most expensive weapon system in human history, which is woefully deficient.
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And when you look at other armies, how does the U.S. therefore compare to other armies?
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How much do we actually know about the Chinese army?
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Because I imagine they must have the same challenges when you look at how many people are involved in it, et cetera.
00:12:03.940
It's, it's, um, a military consists of multiple things.
00:12:07.300
It's not just the hardware that's available, the quantity of hardware, but it's also the, uh, the hardware, right?
00:12:14.180
There's an old saying, um, it's not the steel in the ships that makes a great Navy.
00:12:18.320
Um, it might've been a British Admiral that said that.
00:12:22.840
Uh, China has certainly, um, on the industrial base side, they have a lot of supply.
00:12:35.980
They have a leadership problem, even, even as bad as the U.S. military's leadership problem.
00:12:41.020
We have them because we have bureaucrats that have been promoted, not warriors.
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The, um, the Chinese have a problem of corruption of those senior military positions are paid
00:12:52.780
And once they're in that position, they kind of harvest the, um, the fruits of their position.
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Um, so it's not necessarily, you want the very best, right?
00:13:01.760
A military should be about lethality and merit, nothing else.
00:13:06.580
Uh, and the U S military has drifted from that course.
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And I think Pete Hegseth is trying to take him back in the right direction of lethality and
00:13:16.920
Um, but ultimately I think military, when you look through history, generals make good
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decisions, but it's the sergeants and the staff officers that carry it out at the bleeding
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And the, in the West, the, um, the empowering and the, uh, the decision-making that an NCO
00:13:37.960
It's, it's, it's culturally good in the West because they'll make a decision.
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They'll take a risk and go left, even though somebody might be saying go right, because
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they're applying common sense with the most information at hand.
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Um, the very, very top-down driven decision-making of Chinese culture is, is, uh, troubling in an
00:14:00.160
And we saw that in, in the Russia-Ukraine war as well, initially, particularly when the
00:14:03.740
Russians were having a lot of problems organizing things, supply lines, et cetera.
00:14:07.640
Um, what I, I'd be curious to, to ask you, you mentioned lethality and merit.
00:14:12.840
But we talk a lot about, you know, wokeness and DEI on this show.
00:14:20.900
You know, a lot of people in our space who are not military experts will say, well, obviously,
00:14:24.760
you know, if you have DEI in armed forces, they're not going to be good.
00:14:30.280
Again, if you focus on who, I don't care which bathroom somebody uses or who they sleep with,
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how well can they drive that ship, fight that ship, conduct combat operations from their
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aircraft, or lead a small unit in battle, that's what matters.
00:14:47.920
It's not a importionment of, of the right people, of the right ethnic diversity, having
00:14:53.620
No, I want, um, uh, decisive, bold leaders, killers in those positions to make those decisions
00:15:02.880
because, uh, modern warfare happens at an even faster pace.
00:15:09.580
So I guess what I was asking really is, do you feel that prior to the, to the new administration,
00:15:14.560
the, the quality of the, of the armed forces was degraded by this process of trying to make
00:15:22.780
A completely mal, uh, directed leadership when they're enforcing, when they're spending more
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and more time doing diversity training, uh, instead of marksmanship, land nav, gunnery,
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whatever the, the, the, the lethalities are simple examples of, um, U S Navy in the 2016,
00:15:45.180
17, 18 period killed more sailors by ship collisions by U S warships in the South China
00:15:52.180
sea or off Singapore running into commercial vessels.
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There's three collisions, two of them with multiple fatalities of a billion dollar Burke
00:16:03.200
class, uh, uh, destroyer running into a commercial ship in a seaway.
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Now this is something with a, with a half a million dollar combat surgeon, uh, uh, combat, um,
00:16:15.580
information center to fight the ship and organize it.
00:16:17.940
And yet you can't see a 50,000 ton cargo ship coming at you at 25 knots.
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The bottom Richard, which was a, a helicopter carrier that started on fire while it's in
00:16:31.320
It took them an hour and a half to get first water fighting the fire in the bowels of the
00:16:39.180
So it's a billion dollar, you know, Oh shit moment.
00:16:43.000
Um, the Navy just, um, in December operations in the red sea, they're doing a lot of sorties
00:16:52.240
because they're shooting down all these incoming drones at the ships and, uh, a U S cruiser
00:16:57.700
fires, multiple missiles, shoots down one aircraft, shoots a second missile at another
00:17:07.280
But yeah, they, they literally shot down two of their own.
00:17:10.000
Well, shot down one, almost shot down a second.
00:17:12.420
And these were aircraft that were not 30 and 50 miles out on patrol.
00:17:16.100
They were on in the traffic pattern on final to land on the carrier.
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These are the kind of, and this is in peacetime.
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That's the kind of Oh shit moments you cannot have.
00:17:28.600
Look, I hate the eyes much as anybody, but are you right to connect this to stuff like
00:17:32.920
Or is this just something that's kind of statistically speaking in a huge organization?
00:17:38.820
For example, when those two ships, when they had the ship collisions, they had multiple
00:17:43.180
cases of crewmen, instead of manning their damage control station, were cowering in the
00:17:49.140
That doesn't sound like that's what they should be doing.
00:17:51.620
They had, the Navy had to change bootcamp to do resiliency training after that, to try
00:17:59.520
And I would say that derives from either hiring the wrong people or providing the wrong training
00:18:08.820
And we're here to prepare to wage naval combat, which is brutal and fiery and violent.
00:18:16.820
And if you're not training with that mentality, you're in the wrong business.
00:18:20.540
That's, I mean, look, I've never been around war.
00:18:26.280
I'm not a military person in any shape or form, but to me that isn't that just common sense?
00:18:31.560
Well, your, your audience may not be military experts, but I hope they're common sense experts.
00:18:38.120
So there's a lot of this that comes down to common sense.
00:18:40.900
Because that to me, if you, the last, but in a crisis situation, whatever it is, whatever
00:18:46.380
your area of expertise is, that shouldn't be your reaction, whether you're a medic, whether
00:18:51.920
you're a firefighter, whether you're an ambulance, whatever you may be, but for the military, I
00:19:05.320
And that worries me because that means that when you look at the superpowers like the Russians
00:19:16.220
I can't imagine a situation like that happening and Chinese soldiers having a meltdown and starting
00:19:24.080
It's, it's a culture of too many training timeouts where they say, oh, this is too intense for
00:19:30.440
No, it's, it's, um, you don't get to hit pause in a, in a firefight.
00:19:34.040
Do you feel that that's about to change all of this?
00:19:38.600
I think Pete Hegseth as SecDef is, uh, setting the right tone.
00:19:42.900
And, uh, hopefully there's going to be some significant firings of a lot of people that don't
00:19:48.320
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00:21:10.400
Well, do you know what I found weird about this whole thing, Eric, is, and you emphasize
00:21:15.880
that it's senior leaders in particular that are causing all of this.
00:21:19.060
And I just think, like, how did we get to, you look at the history of America's military
00:21:24.540
from the generals that you had at the time of World War II and since to generals who are
00:21:29.200
now pushing DEI and talking about, you know, white supremacists and all of this stuff that
00:21:35.400
When General Marshall took over as chief of staff in 1939, September, okay, the same
00:21:45.780
day that the Germans rolled into Poland, he took over the U.S. military, U.S. Army, and
00:21:50.580
he fired dozens of generals and colonels because they were ready to fight the last war.
00:21:55.360
They were still wanting to fight trench warfare or World War I.
00:21:58.840
He kind of felt the fight coming and he made the moves to get it ready.
00:22:02.480
Um, the naval command that started, were in charge at the beginning of World War II were
00:22:11.620
We started the global war on terror in 2001 and never was there a house cleaning.
00:22:16.720
So we had peacetime generals, flag officers, and all of those people stayed in and it kind
00:22:21.580
of became a self-linking ice cream cone because it was a managed war.
00:22:24.660
I would say a conflict of convenience, not of national survival.
00:22:31.540
And so no one ever said, well, wait a minute, I want only the most lethal, effective, um,
00:22:44.480
I mean, at some point the U.S. and Iraq had 93 flag officers on the ground, 93.
00:22:49.960
Don't imagine just their staff and their personal support and all the rest meant they had an
00:22:54.860
entire brigade of staff support supporting 93 flag officers in Iraq alone.
00:23:00.800
So it becomes very bloated, like the hardware side of things.
00:23:05.200
As overpriced and bloated and obese as the defense industry is selling highly overpriced
00:23:13.620
products, you can see the same thing in the flag officer corps.
00:23:19.520
Is that why, you know, we had Nick Freitas on the show, uh, a while back.
00:23:23.300
Um, and one of the things he talked about, and we've heard this from a lot of people
00:23:26.500
anecdotally, privately, as well as on the show, a lot of people lower down the ranks who
00:23:32.600
wanted to serve their country, who wanted to do that job leaving after a while because
00:23:44.340
So that you get a high utilization rate during the Iraq-Afghanistan conflicts.
00:23:49.120
And normally the U S army promotes 75% of captains to majors, right?
00:23:54.660
From 03 to 04 for a while, they were promoting 95% or 99%.
00:24:01.420
Because everyone was leaving above them, right?
00:24:03.480
And so when you're, when you don't cut out your bottom quartile of turds, the turds
00:24:11.240
And so do that systemically across the organization for 15, 20 years.
00:24:17.440
Well, so again, there's some great people that are serving, but there's a lot of not
00:24:25.000
We have as many flag officers now in the military as we did in World War II, actually more, um,
00:24:32.100
in, uh, in World War II, we had 14 million men under arms in America.
00:24:35.960
Now we have less than 1.4, but the same amount of flag officers in an era of video conferences,
00:24:44.540
Instant communication where you should be able to run a flat and fast organization.
00:24:50.520
And that's the, that is the winnowing, the rationalization that I hope Secretary Hegseth
00:24:54.840
does and cuts our flag officers down probably by 70, 80% is what the number that should come
00:25:00.000
And how badly has the war in Iraq affected the morale of people in the army and people
00:25:10.820
Because I remember in 2003, there were marches on the streets of the UK and people were saying
00:25:17.460
this is an unjust war, which is then later proven to be true.
00:25:21.480
So how many people were actually going, I don't want to join the army because we were lied to
00:25:26.640
How can I trust the information that I'm being given now?
00:25:32.380
The issue is, um, is how, once you're there, how it's conducted and when you have politicians.
00:25:39.340
So we really allowed lawyers to infiltrate the military, to infect it almost like Zompolits,
00:25:45.940
like the political commissars were in the Soviet Union.
00:25:48.320
In a, in a Soviet naval ship, squadron, uh, ground combat unit next to the commander would
00:25:55.960
be the Zompolit, the political officer who would enforce the will of the party.
00:25:59.820
We've allowed lawyers to second guess into undercut command authority at every level.
00:26:06.320
And so the issue is not what happened 20 years ago when this war started, it's how are we
00:26:11.580
getting it on and how are we fighting and how we'll be allowed to fight.
00:26:14.500
And when it's constant half measures, when, when there's troops in contact in a valley
00:26:20.920
in Afghanistan and they have to call and talk to a lawyer 2000 miles away in an air conditioned
00:26:28.740
At LUD Air Force Base, where the CENTCOM headquarters are for permission to drop a bomb.
00:26:33.100
You're not serious about waging war and it undervalues the value of the troops because
00:26:38.040
it's more important for some lawyer and their ass covering about whether you can drop a bomb
00:26:42.980
That's the thing that really pisses troops off.
00:26:45.580
Because it also compromises troop safety because when you're...
00:26:48.800
Unequivocally, when you over lawyer and you, and you prevent ground commanders from seeing
00:26:54.360
through and winning fights decisively, you get half-assed managed conflict for 20 years
00:27:00.140
in Afghanistan that ends in a complete blowout, debacle, collapse, embarrassment.
00:27:04.200
And again, no one's been held to account, not one flag officer, all the super polished
00:27:10.580
generals, which are now serving on boards and hedge funds and universities and all the
00:27:19.800
They were entrusted with our troops' lives with hundreds of billions of dollars and they
00:27:27.660
The only guy that's been held accountable for Afghanistan is Lieutenant Colonel Stu Scheller.
00:27:32.220
Because he had the audacity on camera in a uniform to call bullshit on the officers to
00:27:38.240
say, hey, because at that point he was the head of the infantry training school at Quantico
00:27:44.160
And he said, if some of my students go to the range and they lose their M-16, they're going
00:27:49.480
Who's punished for losing and for completely effing up in Afghanistan?
00:27:53.980
And they drove him out of the military for that.
00:27:56.400
I mean, no, like 18 or 19 years, no pension again.
00:28:00.640
So, yeah, there's some raw ire amongst the veterans.
00:28:05.260
And I have suffered this much compared to guys who have suffered their mental health,
00:28:11.400
their physical health, lost limbs, eyes, families, brain health.
00:28:15.680
It's ridiculous that we have no accountability.
00:28:22.020
More than than overpriced weapons and stupidity.
00:28:25.500
It is a lack of confidence in the leadership to, A, take care of their people, and, B, to get
00:28:36.860
And if your priority is covering your ass, then your priority-
00:28:40.500
You're going to cover your ass to the detriment of your people.
00:28:50.980
If you can't trust your leader, if you don't think that your leader has your best interests
00:28:57.000
And especially, why are you going to follow them into battle?
00:28:58.820
And why should they be trusted on the boards that they sit now?
00:29:04.920
Well, Eric, it's one of the things that you have, obviously, particular expertise in is
00:29:11.620
And this has become a thing that we see in Ukraine with the Wagner Group.
00:29:16.160
And I know you've talked at some points about the ability of these units to do a different
00:29:21.100
job or to do the same job as the main military better.
00:29:26.680
By the way, I noticed you tense up as I asked the question.
00:29:33.560
That is the most alpha answer to that question, isn't it?
00:29:39.340
Yeah, I just pulled a muscle shooting a massive grenade launch.
00:29:44.640
Look, the private sector has been, I think it's a big misnomer for people to think that
00:29:52.180
If you were laying siege to a city in Eastern Europe a thousand years ago and you needed somebody
00:29:57.740
to run the trebuchets or the battering ram, those were contracted professionals, those
00:30:02.980
So, all through history, whether it's the artillerymen, the other specialties that gets pulled
00:30:13.580
As you get to, so I think a pendulum swinging back towards more use of private military contractors
00:30:22.160
When America was fighting for its independence, nine out of 10 ships taken in the American
00:30:32.600
It was such a thing that it's actually written into the U.S. Constitution.
00:30:36.620
Before it even talks about Congress raising an army or a navy, it talks about a letter of
00:30:43.080
So, there's even talk of bringing back the letter of mark as a way to go after cartels
00:30:51.980
So, the idea of private organizations that can organize, and I guess an even simpler example
00:30:57.200
would be what Elon Musk has done in revolutionizing space launch.
00:31:02.120
If he tried to do that only through a government entity, it was constantly beating his head against
00:31:06.860
the wall against bureaucracy and nonsense, and he, obviously, he said, look, we're going
00:31:11.080
to lower the cost of launch by a thousandfold, and he's doing it.
00:31:16.100
In an era of vastly, of quick, evolving technology, the private sector is about the only thing that
00:31:26.580
And so, skilled people that can organize the right people with the right mindset, the right
00:31:33.140
incentives with the right equipment, you'll find that more and more happening.
00:31:39.240
You could even say, even in Ukraine, the one smart thing that Zelensky did the whole war
00:31:43.660
was he opened up the arm race when the Russian invasion happened.
00:31:47.980
So, people could go grab an anti-tank missile, an RPG, or whatever, and they innovated.
00:31:52.860
And that's who really did the first FPV drones with the small charges that they just figured
00:31:59.000
What you'll see, I think, going forward, you see a lot of countries that want investment
00:32:07.640
in struggling parts of the world, and people are reluctant to do so because there's no security
00:32:13.320
And you'll see more and more a resource investment or an infrastructure investment that comes with
00:32:20.120
its own almost attached PMC, which is largely, it's not all expats.
00:32:24.940
There's a few expats, largely governing, managing local forces to secure that capability.
00:32:32.940
Almost the same way, you know, the first presence of Britain in the United States, the Massachusetts
00:32:39.580
Bay, Jamestown, Plymouth companies were listed on the City of London exchange.
00:32:47.200
They hired people like John Smith and Miles Standish, former professional British officers
00:32:51.580
that joined onto these companies and built this trading presence colony.
00:32:57.260
I mean, the ones up north were there to harvest tall trees for masts for Her Majesty's ships.
00:33:04.640
So, this is a reversion to what the historical norm is.
00:33:08.820
After the kind of all-government-all-the-time approach, after World War II for the last, you
00:33:13.580
know, 50 years, you're seeing a swing back towards a lot more private sector participation,
00:33:18.140
which, like I said, goes back a couple thousand years.
00:33:24.220
I mean, talk about infrastructure of situations where you really would want a private military
00:33:29.620
company involved versus the military trying to do it in a kind of...
00:33:33.500
The simplest thing is a PMC can organize much smaller footprint and significantly cheaper,
00:33:40.420
probably at 10% or less the cost structure of what a military can.
00:33:44.360
And I'll just give a simple example of a place that we took over in the Blackwater days.
00:33:50.440
It was a remote base that had to be secure in a very weird place.
00:33:55.800
And we replaced 166 soldiers with 25 of our guys.
00:34:00.320
The Army had a 28-man rifle platoon, but they had to send 138 support people to support 28.
00:34:07.200
I sent 25 guys, and five of the guys were dual-hatted to keep the water, the power, the sanitation,
00:34:13.080
the food, and the vehicles running, and it all just worked.
00:34:16.920
And that's a very simple thing because a private organization has to know what its costs are.
00:34:24.700
Versus the military, when everything is a free good, you tend to use a lot more free goods.
00:34:29.760
And so the taxpayers get the bill, and we realize it's really not so free.
00:34:33.080
Is the danger with this—obviously, there was a controversy with Blackwater in Iraq.
00:34:39.020
But also, you see it with the Wagner Group in Ukraine, where Yevgeny Pregosyan,
00:34:44.160
the late Yevgeny Pregosyan, you know, really started to feel pretty powerful.
00:34:48.880
And, you know, guys who have private armies get a sort of sense of themselves
00:34:53.020
as potential political players and start to mess around.
00:34:55.880
Is there—you know, what are the trade-offs of this reversion to what you call the norm?
00:35:00.620
Well, when countries or companies hire this capability, they're doing a defined mission.
00:35:17.280
It doesn't have the long-term cost in insurance and retirements that full-time militaries do.
00:35:23.240
Of course, you have to operate under some countries' letter of the law.
00:35:28.100
And you could argue that people can complain about PMCs not adhering to the law,
00:35:35.160
but you could also say, well, M23 or any of the 130 different resource gangs
00:35:45.020
I mean, 80% of the women in Eastern DRC are raped.
00:35:47.240
Okay, so people can complain about a private military company being out of control.
00:35:52.540
Well, I would say sending proven people that have served well in a real military
00:36:02.080
sending them to do a job is a better predictor of good behavior and future performance
00:36:07.340
than allowing the status quo of total insanity and meltdown
00:36:11.220
when you have 80% rape from 130 different resource gangs
00:36:16.540
and a nation-state sponsoring an attack like Rwanda having invaded the DRC.
00:36:21.820
Or in Haiti, where you have gangs controlling about 90% of the terrain of Port-au-Prince,
00:36:31.420
So you have an entire country of 12 million literally held hostage
00:36:40.880
There's a lot of countries that deserve better,
00:36:42.800
and I think the space created the last 50 years,
00:36:46.420
you've seen the U.S. government with USAID spending wildly and saying,
00:36:50.480
oh, yeah, we got this, and we can manage this, and we're great at it.
00:36:54.080
Clearly, they're not, and I'm happy to see Trump clip their wings on that,
00:36:58.680
and I think you'll see, again, a reversion to actual private sector efficiency
00:37:03.880
and accountability, and if people don't like that, they'll change vendors.
00:37:08.300
They'll find a different solution, but the all-government-all-the-time solution
00:37:17.300
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00:39:17.360
Eric, is there a danger that countries use private military companies
00:39:24.280
when they want to do certain activities, tasks, missions
00:39:29.700
that they don't want to associate with their military?
00:39:33.360
So, for instance, China would hire a private military company
00:39:47.200
Well, effectively, China did that in the last Mexican election cycle
00:39:51.180
because there was 37 political candidates assassinated in Mexico
00:39:58.780
So, the same China that's been pushing fentanyl precursors
00:40:11.040
stayed friendly to the Chinese Communist Party,
00:40:16.740
So, whether it's whoever blew up the Nord Stream pipeline,
00:40:55.000
Well, there's been British policy for hundreds of years, right?
00:41:04.740
Well, Germany has just gone so completely astray politically
00:41:11.420
Well, there's different ways Germany can come back.
00:41:14.960
So, what I was going to say is the reason the people,
00:41:25.460
I cannot see anyone in the Biden administration
00:41:52.700
and many of them have said this is the most fraught
00:41:55.120
that the world has been in a long period of time.
00:42:04.860
is the biggest pendulum swing in military change,
00:42:09.920
really, since Genghis Khan put stirrups on horses.
00:42:16.120
I mean, he created the largest empire the world has ever seen
00:42:36.020
he had a 150,000-man army with an extra 300,000 horses.
00:42:44.640
so they could just move hundreds of miles a day
00:42:55.540
and all that stuff so he could take on fortified cities as well.
00:43:07.100
I mean, look at what happened in Syria just a few weeks ago.
00:43:09.140
So, you know, the entire Syrian Arab army was wiped.
00:43:16.640
Turkish intelligence, Turkish special operations
00:43:33.160
but they're certainly preparing mentally for war
00:43:36.940
I would say most militaries are too conservative
00:43:45.000
not fully aware of just how volatile the change is.
00:44:26.640
and dropped it on the very expensive watchtowers
00:44:30.380
with the cameras and the remote weapon stations,
00:45:22.860
The only guy that did something was the head of the Shabak,
00:45:25.840
and he sent a couple of 12-man teams to the south.
00:45:34.320
and at least make them go to sleep with their guns,
00:45:43.580
But again, the Shabak guy that sent the 12-man teams,
00:46:11.900
would have been four or five times that amount.
00:46:33.780
with small drones coming from Hezbollah in the north.
00:47:18.220
and makes it a fully automated anti-drone system,