The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart - The Military Industrial Complexity

Episode Date: June 13, 2024

On the 80th anniversary of D-Day, we reflect on how the US military saved democracy from fascism. This week, as the Senate marks up next year’s defense spending bill, Jon sits down with Bill Hartung of the Quincy Institute and Roxana Tiron of Bloomberg to investigate whether our arsenal is still bolstering democracy, both abroad and at home. From the active conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza to our rivalry with China, we explore the efficacy of U.S. strategy. Plus, we dive deep into the ballooning defense budget and discuss Jon’s attempts to shine a light on it all.  And you can also check out the tax tool shared with us by a resourceful listener here: https://us.abalancingact.com/2023-federal-taxpayer-receipt Follow The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart on social media for more:    > YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@weeklyshowpodcast > Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/weeklyshowpodcast > TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@weeklyshowpodcast  > X: https://x.com/weeklyshowpod CREDITS Host/Executive Producer – Jon Stewart Executive Producer - James Dixon Executive Producer – Chris McShane Executive Producer – Caity Gray Lead Producer – Lauren Walker Producer – Brittany Mehmedovic Video Editor & Engineer - Rob Vitolo Audio Editor& Engineer Nicole Boyce Researcher - Catherine Nouhan Music by Hansdle Hsu — This podcast is brought to you by: ZipRecruiter Try it for free at this exclusive web address: ziprecruiter.com/ZipWeekly   NetSuite For more info, head to netsuite.com/Weekly Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

hello everybody and welcome once again to the weekly show with with john stewart the podcast that happens once a week uh because of well that's the that's the title obviously i host the daily show also once a week none of this sense, people. None of it will make any sense. But I'm delighted. Hopefully, we will have a lovely conversation again. You remember last week, we sort of talked about the soft threats to democracy rather than the autocracies and the authoritarians and the demagogues, just the way that democracy functions and what role that plays in making us vulnerable. And today's episode, oh, oh, are we diving into the mama bear of all soft corruption that perhaps puts our democracy at risk. The military-industrial complex.

I was struck when I was watching all the Normandy celebrations. There was this kind of exaltation that we had saved democracy through military might. And I think there's really no question that that is what occurred during World War II. and have taken that idea of military intervention as the tip of the spear for any interest for the United States, controlling interest, shaping the world in the way that we want to, and making it more democratic through this incredibly gigantic and perhaps bloated military machine that we've created and then exported to all of these countries. And we're going to talk about two things, really. One is strategy. Is our strategy of military intervention, whether it be Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Ukraine, all of these ways that we intervene militarily, is it an effective strategy for protecting American interests, for spreading democracy, for spreading freedom? Is that really the way that any of that is supposed to be done. And the second part of it is more logistical,

which is the opaque nature of the multi-tentacled military-industrial complex. I don't want to say beast. Would beast be the right animal? I'm trying to think of octopus, kraken. I'm going to go with kraken is the metaphor. But a little bit of housekeeping from last week. I wanted to ask you guys, Lauren, are you there, Brittany? We are here. Hi, John.

Our fabulous producers, Lauren Walker, Brittany Mamedovic. Hello, John. Is that too fervent an introduction? No, I love it. Yeah, my parents will love it. All right. That's who it's for. That's the only people that it's for. Yeah. So we were talking about sort of the difficulty of tracking money.

And one of the disconnects with the American form of government is for taxpayers to have any real sense that the money that they're putting into the government has any efficacy for them, has any real effect on their lives. And Jane Mayer, who wrote the book Dark Money, brought up an idea by the New Republic's Michael Tomasky about tracking sort of this idea that your tax contribution is tracked. Am I correct that that's actually a thing? Well, yeah, we got a ton of like really thoughtful comments from listeners. But one person wrote in on Twitter that there actually is a website that you can put in,

let's say, you know, how much you've paid in federal taxes. And it breaks down the percentage of you. So you can see all the different buckets where your tax money is going. And it's fun to play with. They're going to link to it in the description of the episode. So basically, we demand that you listen to the episode and then read about it and then, and then click links. But what's fascinating to me about it is, uh, so this is based on a $15,000, uh, tax contribution. The largest portion of it is healthcare.

$4,000 of the $15,000 is to Medicare, Medicaid, Affordable Act subsidies. So basically the largest share of your tax money goes to a thing that you still have to pay for. Yeah. You pay for it so many times. You just keep, you pay for it to the government and then you pay for it on your own when you get sick and you can still go bankrupt if you don't have enough to pay for it. It's really fun. It's, it's the first piece of insanity of our, of our tax bill. Boy, right there. If you could disconnect that, uh, that would be, and then, uh, the next, uh, tranche is social security, which actually does have, I think, a real effect on people's lives,

but not until you look like me. So you work your fucking ass off until you look like me. And then they say, have a sandwich on us, but you've been putting the money in the whole damn time. And then the third one is defense. And the fourth one is interest. So we're down four layers before any of the shit that you might want you get from your tax money. Bonkers. It blows my mind.

Yeah. It's mind boggling. But, but thank you to the Twitter follower who sent that to us. Really valuable. And we also got word on there's a few other kinds of groups that are working on very similar things. And so hopefully we'll get a chance to talk to them in the future. But today is really about, for me, the disconnect between the aims of American foreign policy, which is to

spread democracy and stability, and the actual effects of what our foreign policy have sown, which is oftentimes, I think, more chaos and destruction. And so we have two, I think, really interesting guests and experts that can speak to that. And I think we'll get to them now. Would that be, should I do that? Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. Come on. Who's better than us? All right, here we go. Let's get them. Okay. So welcome everybody. We've got with us today Bill Hartung, Senior Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, which may or may not be an oxymoron, and Roxana Turan, Senior National Security both for being here. The series is generally about sort of the soft threats to democracy that come from the kinds of corruption that occur in these larger governmental systems. And today's focus, military industrial complex. We're going full Eisenhower on this bad boy.

So we've got a couple of things going on right now. We've got the national defense authorization is, I think, being debated right now. But we also had the Normandy celebrations. And I was really struck by, obviously very moving, but this idea that we had saved democracy through our military intervention. And obviously you make the case that we did. The question is, what then did we do with that saved democracy? And did we take the wrong lesson from World War II in that military might and those kinds of buildups are what keep the world safe for democracy? And certainly we have a lot of things, but I wanted to jump that premise out to everybody first. Did we take the wrong lesson from World War II in that?

To a large degree. I think especially the hawks who say every problem, it's military first. You know, in World War II, we beat an aggressor. It was one nation against another, convinced of warfare. Our industrial mind was a big factor, courage of our troops. And of course, he was doing unspeakable things to the Jewish population. And he looked like he could make good on his threats to dominate the world. Even then, Roosevelt had to do some work. There were the isolationists, America firsters. A lot of people was like, well, that's Europe's problem. They didn't know how serious it was. But I think it was a necessary war and it was

appropriate to celebrate it. And we needed to get into it, to be fair to the world, we needed to be attacked before we jumped in. We were very reticent. We were arming Britain, I guess, and other areas, but we were not in any way jumping in until we were attacked at Pearl Harbor. Right. It was late in the day and some members of Congress didn't even want to arm the UK. So there's really quite a sales that Roosevelt had to do. But the problem is, I think a lot of people now, that's their template. That's right. But not every opponent is Hitler. They don't have that kind of power. Not every war is conventional. So if you look at Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, although the rhetoric was used, Saddam was Hitler, Putin is Hitler. The axis of evil under George Bush was kind of reminiscent of the axis powers in World War II.

And I think part of that is motivational, but part of it, it changes your approach. And I think they downplay diplomacy as appeasement, and they often use the wrong tools to fight the war. So yeah, I think in that sense, we've made the wrong move. I think we need an effective defense, but we have to be more careful about when we use it. It's got to be part of a more- Careful about where we use it. There's a bumper sticker. Careful, careful about where we use it. Let's talk about, I was fascinated. The general military spending during World War II was, they say it translates into today's dollars to about $5 trillion in spending. Over the same amount of time just recently, if you walk back, I guess, four or

five years here in America, not in a global conflagration. We've spent almost $4 trillion on our military. Yeah, we have. Which shows that we don't really have this judicious approach. There was this idea that we're very reluctant to use military force. We have 800 military bases projected around the world. That's probably more than twice the amount

of embassies and consulates and all the other things there. The State Department budget is a pittance when you think about the defense budget might be around $840 billion. The State Department budget probably around, to Bill's point, $50 billion in terms of that's our, hey, let's give the carrot. The stick is apparently much larger than the carrot. Is that a new phenomenon for us, Roxanna? I think you're right about that. And in fact, the national defense budget is $895 billion. What? So, and it will be in the next fiscal year. That's what they're working on right now in Congress. But I do think that it's very dry. But the reason the budget is so high to a large extent is that personnel, people, have a different value system. They have different life

goals. What the military is selling might not be as good for them. But anyways, go back to the cost of it. And then you have this entire focus on high-powered weaponry, highly developed weapons, stealth fighters. Your smart weapons, your stealth fighters. Exactly. And what happens is you only have a handful of companies that can build them. They're the companies that basically cater to the government. They don't have many other customers. They're not commercial companies. And so it becomes this giant- Now, those companies you're talking about, Raytheon, you're talking about. Yeah, I'm talking about the major contractors, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman. And those companies have gigantic lobbying efforts that go on in Congress. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying Congress to get those contracts, to build those weapons. And we should make clear out of that $890 billion defense budget,

about half of it goes to defense contractors. You're talking about $400 billion, $450 billion that goes to these defense contractors. More or less. I mean, you still have money that goes on training and operations and logistics. And so that's also very, very expensive to do right. But the contractors, so you have this specific focus, but at the same time, the bureaucracy at the Pentagon has grown significantly. I was just looking actually recently, just in terms of the defense authorization bill, for example, that you brought up. During World War II, it was basically one page long. Now you have thousands and thousands of pages and millions of dollars. Wait, during World War II, it was one page long?

Yes. What did it, it just said fund the war? Yes, basically, this is how much money would go to aircraft. This is how much money would go to shipbuilding and all of that. And the rest just like happened. Right. So things have changed tremendously since World War II. And the bureaucracy has grown. The sort of the interest, you know, the congressional interest in defense has grown as well because all of these companies, and not just the major companies, they have, you they have factories and facilities in specific districts. It's a jobs program. The military industrial complex is a

jobs program for many districts. And oftentimes those jobs are much higher paid than other regular blue collar jobs. And so they're very attractive. And so you, you get into a very hard time trying to cancel or cut money and programs because there's, you always take money away from someone else in Congress. And so, and then you have the whole argument about how you endanger national security. And again, it's an unassailable term. At least this is what I have noticed in the years that I have covered this topic. So that's the complexity. Once the tentacles of this military-industrial complex start to grow, you can't cut the jobs because those jobs are purposefully spread out throughout a lot of different districts so that the money can be spread around really well,

and people will argue not to do that. National defense is a very loaded term, so you can't do that. So this brings us kind of to the crux of the conversation, which is twofold, I think. One is strategic. Is the money that we're spending actually holding up the goal of defending democracy and defending, in many respects, the interests of the United States. So we have, is our military industrial complex helping us accomplish those goals strategically? And the second part of the conversation is the mechanics and logistics of a department that is not transparent, is the only department within the United States

government that has yet to pass an audit. So it's very opaque. We don't really know where a lot of this money goes. Sometimes the weaponry as it was in Afghanistan is just lost to history. Sometimes pallets of billions of dollars just kind of disappear. So let's start with the strategic one. Let's think about Afghanistan. Let's roll that back. Afghanistan was attacked by Russia in the 80s. So the United States, in our wisdom and defense of democracy, helped the Northern Alliance and the warriors of Afghanistan fend off the Russians. And we sent them a ton of military equipment and we sent advisors over there and we trained them and they helped to bog the Russians down and it bled Russia's

war machine and their economy. And oh, how successful we were. They were repelled. And then we forgot about Afghanistan and somehow all the people that we had trained morphed into Al Qaeda. They attack us and we end up having to go into Afghanistan and not only taking it over, but holding it for 20 years, spending tons of blood and treasure on this place that no one really has any sense of where it is, why it's strategically important. And I guess the point is, aren't we caught in kind of a loop where we are almost creating through our interventions the kind of instability that then we have to go back into and intervene in. Yes, to a large degree.

Unintended. But it seemed like a logical thing. You know, we're arming these people, expel the Soviets. But a lot of the aid went through Pakistan, and they tended to give it to the most extreme elements within Afghanistan. And then you had people like bin Laden, who was, they were recruiting foreign folks to go in there and fight. And so, you know, they said as much, many of the extremists, first the Soviet Union, then America. So even as we

were arming them, they had rhetoric about coming after us. But we felt that the defeating the Soviets was more important. So there's kind of this sense of short-termism, you know, this will work now, but what's going to happen 5, 10, 15 years from now? So there was first kind of not really checking who our alleged friends were. And then there was, okay, if you can disrupt Al-Qaeda, do you really have to dislodge the Taliban, which has a lot of nationalist support there? So some people say, well, a short intervention might've made sense, but a 20-year war did not. And of course, the Washington Post showed that about 10 years in, many of our military folks knew we were losing, but they put a happy face on it.

Well, it almost seems like, how could you not lose? How can you go over to a land that is inhospitable? I remember going over there and thinking, oh, this is like fighting a war on Venus. This was probably, I'd say, five years into the war. Everything in the United States was segregated. If you went anywhere, they were in large military caravans. There was very little integration within the communities. And so you very clearly were trying to place this foreign force into a country and hold it together. But I guess my point is we did the same thing with Russia and communism in Vietnam. to hold back the forces of communism or to hold back the forces of jihadism or to hold back the forces of, and not only has it never been successful in the longterm, it has bled the will of the American people. You know, what, how can we impose military solutions on other people's cultures and beliefs.

But I think also, John, we have to take into consideration that the military, in large part, right, they could give, you know, the advice and consent to the commander-in-chief, to the president and to Congress. But in large part, the military is being used as a tool. And it's being used as a tool by the politicians, you know, whoever is in the White House and whoever is in Congress. And, you know, they will tell you that they will do what they're told to do. Well, that's terrifying. Well, that's what they would that's what they would tell you. And the other thing is, don't we have any other tools? Does anybody have, you know, Don't we have any other tools?

Does anybody have, you know, let's go into the garage. It seems as though every time we find ourselves in a situation where we think we have to defend American values and democracy, the only tool we seem to have is force amplification and projection of American power. Well, sometimes the State Department is just used as an adjunct to clean up the mess of the intervention. Also, for example, when Bush went into Iraq, they purposely got rid of people who knew about the Middle East because they thought they'd be soft. They'd be too close to the regimes. So instead, they put a 25-year-old Bush supporter to redo the Iraqi currency, things like that. So it's almost designed to fail. I think it must be designed to fail and keep things going, but it can't be that cynical. I

guess in Vietnam, I always wondered how many people understood that this was a cynical exercise in American power? The problem is the dissenters, the people who want to go in a different way, get squeezed between the two, between the true believers and the kind of profiteers. So their voices often don't come out for many years. And even though it's not that satisfying to be correct after everything's gone south. All right. Let's hold that there. We shall be right back. okay uh let's jump back in why is it so consistently and roxanna maybe i i get your insight on this why do we consistently make the wrong choice and then after some reflection, make the exact same wrong choice

again a decade later. I just think there's maybe a lack of understanding of, I guess, geopolitics and history in large part as well. I mean, Afghanistan is the best example of that. So I think in large part, the US and particularly the US military is very reactionary. They react to the situation in front of them. It's not prospective, right? So I think you have lots of that, you know, that kind of, I guess, take to conflict, right, since World War II. And it's striking that there have not been more apt lessons from that. Well, not only have we not, you know, what you would consider kind of the win, the battleship, you know, and everybody goes out and they sign the peace treaty, and then we go. And again, not only did we take the wrong lesson, I think, from World War II, I think the Marshall Plan post-World War II also gave America the wrong impression that we can throw

a bunch of money at other countries and build them up in a more freedom and democratic and United States-friendly image, and we can control the world, not just influence it, but control it to some extent. And so we can look at our interventions. You know, Iraq and Afghanistan, it's been estimated that that created probably 40 million refugees. What do those 40 million refugees do? Well, they sow instability in all the neighboring countries that they go in there. So now not only are we defending democracy and defending American interests, we're actually

creating more chaos within that region. And then you flip that with, you know, we're all talking about military intervention. What about weapons sales? We sell to over a hundred countries, some of them who are at war with each other. Yeah. Well, the, you know, the slogan, the slogan, democracy or autocracy, really falls apart when you look at arms sales, arming Saudi Arabia, arming Egypt, arming the Philippines, arming Nigeria. And the reasons are, well, there's reasons. We're

fighting terrorism and so forth. But often those cause instability. They enable slaughter. They hurt the US reputation in the world. But the flip side is, well, it actually keeps our prices down because we're producing more weapons, better scale, and we're going to work better with foreign militaries because our weapons will talk to each other. And that kind of textbook argument often falls down in the actual reality of what we're doing. There's actually a bureau in the State Department- So the idea is it's volume? This is a volume business? often falls down in the actual reality of what we're doing. There's actually a bureau in the State Department. So the idea is it's volume?

This is a volume business? Well, actually, there's a bureau in the Pentagon, a bureau that brokers these things, and they sort of measure their success by how many deals they make, which is really not the way to do it. So there's basically, this is like Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross, and there's a bunch of guys in the Pentagon, and they've got a big billboard, and they're like, always be closing.

And then they, you know, the winner gets to keep his job and a set of steak knives. Well, that's more the State Department, actually. Weapon sales go through the State Department and Congress. The Pentagon has, obviously, yes. The Pentagon kind of is logistics. It's the logistics part of it. Yeah. kind of is logistics.

It's the logistics part of it. Yeah. So the State Department, not only do they have the smaller budget, but a lot of that budget is spent on them figuring out what our weapons sales will be.

It's that we're not even using the soft power to the extent that we're funding it. Some of that funding is going to figuring out how to funnel weapons. Yeah.

And yeah, there is a human rights bureau. You guys are bumming me out here, man. You're bumming me out. We'll come up with a happy ending, but it'll be after the podcast. All right. Yeah, the human rights bureau in state often makes good recommendations, but they get overridden by either other parts of state, the Pentagon, because of, quote, pragmatic reasons. Pragmatic people often get us in the most trouble, the so-called pragmatic people. So let's talk about this. So the United States, the whole idea of the United States

is that we are exporting democracy. We are exporting freedom. We are exporting a philosophy of human existence that is more actualized than these autocracies. But democracy doesn't seem to be as vital a product for the United States to be selling as bombs. It seems like bombs are our most popular sales item, if you look on the Amazon rankings. Yeah. Well, there's a couple of things. One is the state of our democracy. We probably need to import one before we export one. You're saying we got to live up to it first before we can, we got to polish it before we can sell. And we're kind of heading in the wrong direction, it seems. And then, you know, Obama is a concrete thing. You can make it, you can do it to, you know,

foster democracy, even if that's your intention, is a very difficult thing to do. So. I've heard people say America is great because America is good. Is the idea that no matter what we sell, no matter where we put it, it has to be for the greater good because it's us. We're a shining city on the hill. We wouldn't sell weapons to be used in nefarious causes because we're us. Well, I think a lot of the ideals of America would make sense if we could better live up to them. And there's certainly been positive things done. But yeah, I think a lot of people feel like we're the good guys and the military is almost

like a form of foreign aid. We're helping out these folks and they don't look so much at the downsides. And you've heard the term peace through strength, right? They talk about peace and the strength part is the weapons, right? But do we believe these strategies are working, I guess would be my, you know, there are very few metrics that you can place on if these strategies are working. But if one of the metrics is military might not being needed for many interventions, well, we're failing that miserably because I think I read something somewhere. There's been only 11 years in American history where we haven't been at war. 11 years in American history where we haven't been at war. Yeah. Well, it's interesting, you know, when you did your interview with David Petraeus, I believe you kind of walked through what a disaster Iraq was. I think his answer was,

well, we're not supposed to try. And the answer is yes, that was not the thing to try. That's what I meant by, when I was talking to David Petraeus, I said, is America a bit too cavalier when it comes to these interventions and not taking into consideration the catastrophic effects that our militaristic policy may have on those areas? And he said, well, if it weren't for us, we wouldn't be as successful. I said, well, where are we successful? Afghanistan, well, you know, if it weren't for us, we wouldn't be, you know, as successful. I said, well, where are we successful? Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, where? And he goes, well, I think certainly World War II. And I was like, if the last thing we can point to that was a smart, effective use of our military force is World War II, how in God's name have we not changed or shifted policy or direction? Or is

this just the inertia and status quo of this giant machine has a gravity of its own? I think it's ideological and there's profit to be had. I think that notion of America, peace through strength, we're the strongest nation in the world. If we pull back, the kids in the other countries aren't going to behave. All that is very strong. And I think even Trump supporters, a lot of them, they liked the fact that he was beating up Jeb Bush and Hillary about Iraq, even though during Iraq, it wasn't clear where he stood. And some of the vets who voted for him, I think they thought he was an anti-war president. So on the one hand, there's that skepticism. On the other hand, some people feel

like, yeah, I'm taking it on the chin, but at least I'm part of the strongest country in the world, kind of part of their identity. Is there any kind of incentive that we can use for the military or the people making the decisions for the military that could give us a lighter footprint? I mean, how are we supposed to sustain as a country 800 bases and a force projection all over the globe and into space? I think one of the bigger test cases, at least in my opinion, would be Ukraine, right? Okay. in my opinion, would be Ukraine, right? And that's where I think it's important for the United States to prove its might, to prove its democratic values and not actually have

US troops on the ground there. I think that is one of the bigger tests in terms of seeing one of the bigger tests in terms of seeing, you know, sort of all the elements of power for the United States, not just, you know, a military operation. And I'm not exactly sure how it's going to turn out, given that, you know, in the House of Representatives, which is run by Republicans, there is a strong reluctance to help out Ukraine. There's a strong reluctance to put money into weapons that are in fact needed for the war there. Well, but isn't some of that less about who are we actually allied with? I think there's many people on the right who would suggest, actually, we're allied with Putin. He believes more in our woke versus unwoke ideology, he is a defender of Christian orthodoxy.

So why would I back Ukraine when really politically I'm aligned with Russia? Yeah, but they're basically taking the autocratic side. They're on the side of autocracy, right? Which we do all the time. Yes, we do like to prop up strongmen. I mean, we give all those weapons to Saudi Arabia. Yes, that is absolutely correct. Well, that's why Ukraine is sort of a model. There, we're helping somebody repel an invasion. Saudi Arabia, we enabled an invasion, which was quite damaging. So if there were more consistency,

that would be huge. And in that sense, also Ukraine, there's much more transparency. Every time they send them a bunch of weapons, you get a list of what they're sending and how many. In the case of Gaza, the president hit 100 deals by going under the threshold to report to Congress. Because I think whatever he says about supporting Israel, somewhere he understands that this is embarrassing to support this kind of killing. Do they understand it's embarrassing? Because as you said, they just keep doing it. I mean,

look, there are two avenues to go down here. One is moral, which I absolutely object to the way that American power has been used in that situation morally. But the other is strategic. Are our interventions effective strategically to the idea of strengthening democratic values and strengthening American interest around the world? And I think strategically, I would say, morally repugnant, strategically, seemingly dumb and ineffective. It's definitely been ineffective, John repugnant, strategically, seemingly dumb and ineffective. It's definitely been ineffective, John. I mean, that's what I'm saying. I think Ukraine would be a great sort of test case to see whether all of this coming together,

this would function, whether we can support democracy, whether we can export our democratic values to a country that is fighting basically an autocrat who invaded them. It's basically everything that the United States stands against, right? I'm not suggesting that there is never any room for military intervention or that sometimes it's absolutely necessary and it has been forced. But what it does seem is that, let's look at American strategy over these past years. So the one strategy is we send all of our troops into an area where they're utterly viewed

as a foreign invader or hostile organization being within there. We fight there for 10 years, 15 years, or we take it over and then try and hold security there. We fight there for 10 years, 15 years, or we take it over and then try and hold security there. And those just don't seem to work. But the one thing we don't really seem to try is focusing more on statecraft, on diplomacy, on economic incentives, and a much lighter military footprint that when necessary can be used to deter. Well, yeah, exactly. I think as Roxanna noted, it's hard to shift even to build the right weapons

for that strategy because of the pork barrel politics. But the other thing is, every generation, there's miracle weapons, electronic battlefield in Vietnam, the Star Wars impenetrable shield. Revolutionary military affairs achieved some things that wasn't relevant to fighting non-state groups in Iraq and Afghanistan. So there's that thing. And I think now what we're going to see is a clash between the kind of Silicon Valley high-tech folks. They see Lockheed Martin as this dinosaur that has to be replaced. And so in theory, they can shift- So they look at AI and technical advances as the new frontier in weaponry and military.

We're going to employ the same strategies for our military, but we're going to do it through Siri as opposed to patent. Well, they think we can overwhelm China with technology and swarms of drones or at least intimidate them. But that assumes China is going to sit on their hands instead of- What? I mean, it's kind of a recipe for an arms race. And it's a little bit kind of Silicon Valley mindset. It's like, well, hey, if we can live forever in colonized space, why can't we build weapons that'll put us back in the driver's seat like we were maybe in World War II?

But see, this is what's so troubling to me, Bill and Roxanna. You know, we come out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and there's sort of a humbling, a feeling of, boy, that was 20 to 25 years where we bled out so many of our most valuable resources. And to what end? And what is the lesson that we can take from that oh let's just pivot now and militarize against russia and against china and russia yes they invaded ukraine and so that's a very different situation but with china isn't a lot of this rhetoric just trying to militarize an economic rivalry? What exactly are we trying to achieve militarily against China?

It really seems like they're one of our best customers. We're one of their best customers. What exactly are we militarizing? So I think with China, it gets a little bit more complicated, right? So like China has been flexing its muscle in the Pacific, in the South China Sea. It's going to be a big test actually for the United States strategy here in policy, right? We're trying to work more on the diplomatic side with the Philippines and try to build up our allies in the region to basically curb any of China's incursions. But who are we to curb all of China's incursions, I guess? When our interests

are over there, I don't think they're high moral ones. It's to allow the allies to do that themselves rather than have the United States be involved. At the same time, China has been- Like a proxy war. Basically. China has been building up its military. It has way more, probably not the best quality, but it has way more ships than the United States, which is a big deal for the Pacific.

It's putting a tremendous amount of money into their weaponry, into hypersonic weapons, where the United States, unfortunately, because it's trying to test out all this, you know, high tech, it's not working out for the United States as well as it's working out for China and Russia. You know, they're developing, their nuclear arsenal is getting bigger. Space, you know, they control a lot of things in space as well. So you have China's intent in this area, right? So it's only logical for the United States to say, well, we have to be prepared in case they employ all these tactics and weapons. Well, it depends. Prepare for what? I mean, China's not going to attack us. So it's really what happens in the region.

I mean, everything is about Taiwan at this point. Right. And I think for Taiwan, for 40 years, we've kept the peace by having an agreement about how we treat the status of Taiwan. That's changing. I think that's more important to preventing a war than war weapons. And then we do the war games about Taiwan. It's devastating for all concerned. And a lot of the war games don't even talk about what if it goes nuclear. So I think there's got to be a defense system to relate to what's happening in the Pacific. But I think we're too forward-based. There's too many people saying, oh yeah, we can win this war as opposed to how do we deter. So I think that is a little skewed. And certainly in Congress, this committee against the Communist Party, you know, the hawkish head of that is going to work for a venture capital firm.

So, you know, I mean, look, our secretary of defense worked for Raytheon. I mean, there is a revolving door around those contractors and around those things. But I think there is also now and, you know, in large part, Elizabeth Warren has fought very hard to try and sort of slow down the revolving door. So they have to basically recuse themselves for any kind of business on the companies that they worked on or worked for. It's the same thing in lobbying as well. There's a cooling period. Same thing in lobbying as well. There's a cooling period. So there are some reforms in place that have straightened things out a little bit more.

I mean, what's missing is, and Eric Lipton did a thing in the Times, a lot of the military folks are going to work for venture capital firms that are funding this tech. And they're, for the moment, outside of that regulation. I know Senator Warren wants to broaden it to include them. So there's still kind of a loophole that exists. And no one is suggesting the United States be naive about the various threats, but it does seem as though much of what we're doing is trying to protect our economic supremacy. And my position is that these wars, oftentimes amoral,

are also strategically at odds with protecting American economic supremacy and keeping those supply lines flowing. But I want to get to in our final little bit here when it comes to this $880 billion budget and when it comes to, uh, the lack of efficacy for a lot of our efforts. Uh, okay. Let's just, we're going to take a, just a very small break. Let's jump back in. And I want to talk a little bit about they failed a bunch of audits, right, for the military. They failed their audit for the sixth year in a row last November. And it's very likely that they're going to fail it again this November. Just to put it in context, some of the services actually have a clean audit. So it's working its way up into sort of more oversight. But you're talking about $3.8 trillion

in assets for the Pentagon and $4 trillion in liabilities. So it's a lot. And they didn't do an audit for a long time until they were pressed to do it. So I think there's a lot more work to be done. But I would push back a little bit on the fact that they are a little bit opaque, but I think there is significant oversight over the Pentagon as far as it's sort of like a little bit of like the wolf watching the chicken coop. But, you know, Congress does do a lot of oversight and there's like a lot of well-intended lawmakers out there that are trying to keep the Pentagon honest and open and trying to make sure that that money isn't wasted. But there's also obviously a lot of parochial interest in Congress. And that makes, you know, that makes oversight or preventing waste of money a lot harder as well. fewer contract officers seeing what they're doing or not enough information to avoid price gouging, all of which is being discussed in Congress. But then you come up against, well,

yeah, as long as I keep getting a piece of the F-35 in my district. So that's got to be battled out. And then it's just priorities. I mean, the F-35 works, what, 20% of the time? Oh, yeah. I mean, it's currently stacked up in a tarmac, Lockheed Martin tarmac, because delivery cannot be accepted on them because the software doesn't work. So, yeah, it's the F-35. And it's, what was it, 1.7 trillion? 1.7 trillion, yeah. 1.7 trillion. It's like the nominal GDP of Russia over its 66-year lifetime.

Right, right, A long time. We had a child tax credit that cost $94 billion, the child tax credit that reduced child poverty by 30%. You know, we couldn't keep that going as a country. And yet we have this $1.7 trillion boondoggle and they can't, what, get the Sonos to work on it? Like the software doesn't work. That's insanity. So basically, just to build the F-35, just to design, research it, produce it, it's over $400 billion. $1.7 trillion is over its entire lifetime, which requires a lot,

logistics, maintenance, all of that. So you have all of that in. It's a flight. So obviously it's a stealth fighter jet and no one else in the world has this amazing technology that they're trying to promote with this F-35. It's so stealthy we can't use it. It is in fact a flying computer. I think people don't realize that. And so they've had, you know, software refreshes that need to be made for the aircraft to be current, and they're stuck. They're stuck on the latest refresh, and the Pentagon cannot accept the aircraft because it's not doing what it's

supposed to do. They can't use it for combat operations. They can't use it for combat training. That's unbelievable. I mean, I think I would like the government to worry about our lifetimes, not the lifetime of this dysfunctional airplane. I think that's dead on, right? You've seen in Congress, I mean, it was a tremendous crisis when John McCain decided to cancel the F-22 fighter jet program. He would call it a corroding queen because it was corroding, literally, a fresh aircraft that was dealing with corrosion that we had already spent billions of dollars on. And by the way, you talk to any of the guys that are on the ground, they love the Warthog.

Yes, absolutely. They don't give a crap about this 1.7 jet. They love the Warthog. They want the A-10. They want it flying low and they want it dropping as much munition as they can to clear the way. But I want to show you this is, and we'll wrap up. I had an opportunity to speak with the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Kathleen Hicks.

I did a little forum out at University of Chicago for this group of kind of ragtag military reporters called War Horse, started by this fellow named Thomas Brennan, who had served and felt like the rank and file of the military was not being well served by a lot of the military reporting. So he started this War Horse. And it's a phenomenal organization. They do such good reporting and such quality job. So they asked me to come out. I really didn't prepare it. And I was talking to the deputy

secretary of defense and I just asked about the failing of the audits. And I want you to, I want you to listen. I think to what I felt like was a remarkably defensive, for no reason, attitude about even the prospect of being questioned on this. But don't you think that that does speak to the larger point that we're trying to get at, which is good journalism uncovers corruption. Okay, I mean, good journalism doesn't cover corruption, but I'm not sure these two things are linked. Oh, but they are. Okay, so you need to explain to me, do you understand what an audit does and the degree

to which it is linked to the question that you're asking? I believe so. Okay, go ahead. Give me your explanation. I don't mind learning. No, I don't mind learning. So what I would suggest is that the audit that they have in the military doesn't really look at whether or not there's efficacy. It's just whether they got delivered the thing that they ordered.

That is any audit. That is any audit. That is true. But generally, those audits aren't $400 billion for Raytheon and $1.7 trillion for a plane that doesn't seem to be doing it. There is a lot of waste, fraud, and abuse within a system. Audits and waste, fraud, and abuse are not the same thing. So let's decompose these pieces for a moment. Then please educate me on what the difference is.

Sure. So an audit is exactly what you just described, which is do I know what was delivered to which place? Right. which is, do I know what was delivered to which place? Right. The ability to pass an audit or the fact that the DOD has not passed an audit is not suggestive of waste, fraud, and abuse. The conversation goes on to the point where she says to me, you seem awfully concerned about the money. Yeah.

Well, I think, you know, first of all, it was amazingly condescending for a public official. And I think it's because she was trying to muddy the waters. But the audit itself isn't what causes the corruption, but it can enable it. Because if you don't know how your money is being spent, how do you know if it's given to being ghost companies or whatever? Well, that's what I was trying to say to her is, if you don't know where $400 billion is, how do you know it's being spent effectively or the way it was intended? I mean, at the very least, you can argue that there's a waste because if you can't keep track

of where things go and whether they've been delivered and how many, there is a very strong chance that there is a waste. It's just logical. I believe they're spending it on what and in what way, how much is wasted. Much harder to figure out without that. But I mean, if we had clean books, we get all the receipts, it could still be a problem if we're building the wrong things, we have the wrong strategy. But if you care about at least knowing how your money's spent, then you need that. But I was more struck by, to be quite frank, the attitude of the audacity. Now, look, she's an expert there and obviously I am not. So the frustration that she might have with somebody walking in and going, where's that $850 billion. But to be fair,

it's taxpayer money. Some of it's my money. So when you say you seem awfully concerned about it, yeah. And I think we could be using this better, but what really bothered me was this idea that even questioning it is seen as a hostile act that, that given the history of our interventions, given the record of corruption, given the record of ineffectiveness, given the record of a $1.7 billion plane program where the software doesn't work, where the software in the VA, the Veterans Administration, doesn't talk to the software in the VA, the Veterans Administration, doesn't talk to the software in the DOD. Even the idea that you would question that was viewed as how it almost felt like the McCarthy hearing, where it was on the reverse, where she was saying to me, sir, at last,

have you no decency to say to me that we don't know where the money is and that that's corrupt? Well, I think there's an undertone of, it's an anti-democratic strain. It's like, we know about this. You don't know about this. You don't have standing to ask about this. Just trust us. And given everything you've described, why would you trust it? And now she's a big advocate of going all in on tech, how it's going to be cheaper,

better, we're going to do it quicker. That has to be proven. It doesn't fit the history of what we've done. I mean, the F-35 has been going on for 23 years. She wants to build new drones in 18 months. I need some more proof that that's doable. And that the strategy that they're going to be deploying in terms of making these weapons seems considered, not just from a military standpoint, but from a more balanced standpoint of state's craft and other things. Oh, Lord, help us. They had a hearing on this commission that wants to build more nuclear weapons, and I made the mistake of watching it. Most of the members didn't ask about nuclear strategy. They said, hey, there's this nifty thing that's built in my state. Don't we need more? Which was kind of shameful. And then Senator Warren said, oh, by the way,

what's this going to cost? And basically, the head of the panel who used to lobby for North of Grumman said, cost is no object. So they didn't debate the strategy. They didn't debate the cost. And yet they're getting a little bit of traction. But you see Northrop Grumman has the contract to basically modernize the one leg of the nuclear triad, the ground base. It's a program called Sentinel. And it's already over cost and delayed. The Pentagon is actually reviewing it. It's a non-McCurdy breach, basically, when it goes over the threshold and trying to redo it.

Well, Roxana, don't ask about it because they'll get very mad at you. But I do think maybe the deputy secretary took issue with the use of the word corruption because it's reminiscent of, you know, worst times for the Pentagon when corruption was indeed a lot, a lot bigger, right? Well, I use the word waste, waste, fraud and abuse, but that's still happening. They're still spending, you know, 4,000% above cost for certain items. But beyond that, you're talking about an organization where with all the money we're spending, soldiers often live in very poor quality condition housing. And there's also food insecurity on the bases for enlisted people. So if that's not corruption, I don't know what is. You brought up the defense authorization bill. The House Armed Services Committee made it a

priority to boost the quality of life of troops. They are proposing a 19.5% pay increase for the military, who live in really bad conditions, you know, moldy, moldy, you know, housing. They don't have enough money to buy food. Or in your, you know, you were a big advocate for, you know, for the burn pits, you know, victim, they come back and they get sick from their deployments and don't get the care that they should be getting. So there's a lot of very good things that I think the Pentagon and the Veterans Affairs are doing, but there's also a lot that is astounding, right? How does this happen? Is there anything here in a solutionary sense, how can we bring more attention? Because it feels like this all survives in opaqueness.

It all survives in the dark. And there doesn't seem to be, to Bill's point, an enormous appetite to really talk out strategy and talk out efficacy of mechanics and logistics and all those other things. It has a lot more to do with the profits and the sending weapons overseas and keeping that circus running. So how do we bring more attention to it? Because that feels like the only way that you can curb some of these baser instincts in this military-industrial complex. I mean, I think I'm going to make the case for journalism, right? I think, like, reporting is extremely important. I think it really is.

It's on us, in large part, to blow this open and to explain to people how things work and why they work a certain way and what could potentially change. And I also think in large part, right, I mean, I don't know, I don't have a solution for Congress, but I think you do have a few in Congress who are very well intended, who want to blow this open. But I think they need a lot more support. They need their voices amplified. And unfortunately, so far, they get a little bit drowned out by the rest. Do you feel supported, Roxanna, in your newsroom in the way that they amplify your stories on it?

I do. I really do. And I think they do encourage us to. The more we blow open, the better. And the more impact we have that can change the situation, the better. Bill, I tend to think you're maybe slightly less optimistic on it, but what are your thoughts? Well, I think one problem is, if Roxanna can confirm this, I think there's fewer people covering this than there used to be, right? Oh, that's interesting. Also, when there's a big scoop, it doesn't seem to permeate the larger media ecosystem. I just think part of it is the public. I think even people who know some of this feel like, well, what can I do about it? It's kind of a question of democracy to a certain degree, because almost every problem we have, we have a similar issue of, are people going to take action?

Is it going to be effective? Can they take on moneyed interest? So somehow people need to have, I think, a little more faith in themselves and probably Well, no, it didn't work. But, you know, you have to be in it for the long haul. I mean, I've done that. And, you know, frankly, if you just looked at the scoreboard, I'm kind of losing. Not at all, Bill. You're winning. There'll be a turning. There's always moments, like when they rolled back Reagan's nuclear buildup or they pushed Congress to defund Vietnam. But if you look at the timeframe, it's daunting. So people really need to have a longer timeframe and also possibly a different way of looking at our role in the world. That having the big stick is not necessarily a sign of strength.

Bill, I think that, boy, that gets to the exact crux of it. It's sort of that learning that perhaps the best way to spread democracy and democratic values and stability is not at the working end of a rifle. Let's get out of that World War II mindset. God forbid there's another Hitler-type leader that takes over and that has to occur again, and let's hope it never, never does. But that can't be the strategy to go to for economic rivalries or any kind of incursion of a different ideology. It has to be smarter than that.

Also, I think about the troops. I think they're skilled, they're courageous, they're committed, but we can't ask them to do impossible things. Right, but we make them do everything. When they were in Afghanistan, we made them do everything, and in Iraq as well. And some of the isolationists about Ukraine said, oh, yeah, we need the money to militarize the border. Really?

I mean, is that really where we want to go? Well, guys, I really appreciate the conversation. I may be coming to you guys again for, we're having some trouble with the K2 veterans at the VA. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. We're really getting down to the wire with it. How do you assess that the VA is handling the burn pits? So actually, they've done a pretty nice job of outreach. And they've taken in more VBA and VHA claims, up to about a million. So they've done a really good job down the line. Look, these bureaucracies are difficult, and I appreciate that once PAC passed, they really made an effort to implement it. It's, it's unusual in that generally when the government

agrees to a benefit, they create an antagonistic process for you to access it, whether it's a disability payment or something else. It's sort of this idea of we've designed a program to help people. And now we're going to put a lot of obstacles in the way of them to try and access it. So if you're a military contractor, man, the doors are open and it's parties and it's everybody trying to get a hold of some of the delicious money stream that's coming down the way. But if you're a soldier looking to access the benefits, they put you through the wringer. That process is utterly antagonistic. But I think one sign of hope is we've pretty much solved everything we talked about today.

So now you can focus on that. Done. Thank you guys so much for talking. Bill Hartung, Senior Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Roxana Turan, Senior National Security Reporter for Bloomberg Government. I really appreciate your guys' insight into this this and we'll keep checking in on it. Yeah, I'm glad we got to have this conversation. Same.

Thank you. Beautiful. Those guys, I thought those guys were fantastic. So knowledgeable. Amazing conversation. But kind of a downer. I was, you know, last time we got to this sort of nugget of solution that everybody got lit up about, this sort of felt like I think Bill summed it up with, yeah, I don't think that's going to happen. Here's what could happen. I don't think that's going to happen.

I don't want to be more of a downer, but. Yes. What Roxanne was saying about journalism. So I used to be a national security reporter and the way of journalism then was you were very incentivized for clicks and it was an issue if you didn't get clicks and national security, not too interesting. So we would have a chart beat of all the stories. And my stories were never the most clicked. So I was told to start covering some other things like VR and crime so that I could keep my spot. And so I just the fact that they said that there's fewer people covering this, like it's not an accident. Holy shit, Lauren.

I'm glad that she has the support she she needs at Bloomberg, but it's harder and harder to find that support in journalism. That's fascinating, Lauren. And if that's happening in the blood and guts area of military reporting, I can't even imagine what's going on everywhere else. That's really stunning. But anyway, we open up the Twitter lines and Instagram lines to the listeners and the viewers. If you have any stories, let us know because your comments on the previous one were really

helpful and led us into a lot of interesting directions. So yeah, on Twitter, we are Weekly Show Pod, Instagram, TikTok Threads. We are Weekly Show Podcast and our YouTube channel is the weekly show with Jon Stewart. Alright guys, well that's all for this episode of the weekly show. I want to thank, as always, lead producer Lauren Walker, producer Brittany Mamedovic,

the man behind the glass, Rob Vitola. We have a new audio behind the glass, Nicole Boyce, and as always our researcher Catherine Nguyen, who without her, I would just say things that are just lies. So thank you. Thanks to all.

We'll see you guys next time on The Weekly Show. Bye-bye. The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart is a Comedy Central podcast. It's produced by Paramount Audio and Busboy Productions.