"On Contact: America’s War Machine "
Chris Hedges discusses with Andrew Cockburn his new book, ‘The Spoils of War – Power, Profit and the American War Machine’.
by Chris Hedges, On Contact, RT.com (December 17, 2021)
https://www.rt.com/shows/on-contact/543366-america-war-machine-cockburn/
[Introductory Overview]:
Cockburn’s book lays bare the naked lust for profit that is behind America’s endless wars and bloated military budget. The American war machine, he writes, can only be understood in terms of the “private passions” and “interests” of those who control it – principally, a passionate interest in making money.
Thus, Washington expanded NATO beyond Germany, breaking a promise to Russian leaders, to open up the lucrative arms market in Eastern Europe to defense contractors. The US Army insisted on furnishing soldiers with defective helmets from a favored contractor that magnified the trauma and traumatic brain injury caused by an explosion. The US Navy’s Seventh Fleet deployments were for years dictated by a corrupt defense contractor known as “Fat Leonard” who bribed high-ranking officers with cash, drunken parties that lasted days, and prostitutes known as the “Thai SEAL team” to ensure his more than $200 million in contracts. The Air Force spent $50 billion in esoteric devices to deter insurgents’ homemade $25 bombs, including the $100 million Lockheed EC-130H aircraft supposedly equipped with ground-penetrating radar that could detect buried bombs. Only after hundreds of flights was the device found to be useless. Senior Marine commanders agreed to a troop surge in Afghanistan in 2017, not because they thought it would work, but “because it will do us good at budget time.”
Cockburn provides example after example that exposes the ugly reality of the largest military machine in history, at once corrupt, squalid, and terrifyingly dangerous.
0:17 Andrew Cockburn: "We need a threat. We have to have a threat. And the Chinese are obliging. They could do better. They could spend as much on defense as we do, but still, they're responding in a certain way. And so every day here in Washington I hear -- every single day -- some new mad claim about how the Chinese are way ahead of us, and the time is urgent. We've got to act now. We need hypersonic missiles like they supposedly have. I mean, again, you can read in the book what a fraud the whole hypersonic business is. In a way, what's depressing is that nothing changes."
1:04 Chris Hedges: "In Andrew Coburn's book, The Spoils of War, he lays bare the naked lust for profit that is behind America's endless wars and bloated military budget. The American War Machne can only be understood in terms of the private passions and interests of those who control it. Principally, a passionate interest in making money. Thus, Washington expanded NATO beyond Germany, breaking a pledge to russian leaders, to open up the lucrative arms market in Eastern Europe to defense contractors."
"The Army insisted on furnishing soldiers with defective helmets from a favored contractor that actually magnify the trauma and traumatic brain injury caused by an explosion."
"The U.S. Navy's seventh fleet deployments were dictated for years by a corrupt defense contractor known as Fat Leonard who bribed high-ranking officers with cash, drunken parties that lasted days, and prostitutes known as the Thai Seal Team to ensure his more than 200 million dollars in contracts."
"The Air Force spent 50 billion dollars on esoteric devices to deter insurgents' homemade 25-dollar bombs, including the 100 million dollar lockheed EC-130H aircraft, supposedly equipped with ground-penetrating radar that could detect buried bombs. But after hundreds of flights, this device was found to be useless."
"Senior Marine commanders agreed to a troop surge in Afghanistan in 2017, not because they thought it would work, because, in their words'It will do us good at budget time.'"
"Coburn provides example after example that exposes the ugly reality of the largest military machine in history at once corrupt, squalid, and terrifyingly dangerous. Joining me to discuss The Spoils of War: Power, Profit, and the American War Machine is Andrew Cockburn, the Washington editor of Harper's Magazine."
3:22 Chris Hedges: "So, you open the book with this wonderful quote from Alexander Hamilton and then cite Pericles to make the point that the motives behind many wars throughout history are, in fact, not noble at all, but quite tawdry. I'm going to just let you begin by telling us the story about Pericles -- and I studied classics, but I didn't know -- and then we'll get into how that is just replicating itself in modern day America."
3:59 Alexander Cockburn: "Well, it's an instructive case. Pericles, according to Alexander Hamilton and, indeed, to ancient historians who knew about Athens at the time, he, basically, launched a war against the Samians. And you can read all sorts of scholarly literature about why he did this. But the real reason, as everyone knew in Athens at the time, was because his girlfriend, who was a hooker, a prostitute who ran a brothel, was pissed at a rival from another town, Samia, and wanted to do her down. So she got her boyfriend, Pericles, the ruler of Athens, to launch a war which destroyed this poor place, Samos, and killed all the inhabitants, enslaved them. [dead slaves?] And that's how the war started. This led him into tricky political problems so he started the war with Sparta, one of the great epic conflicts of history.
5:10 "And time and time again, that's how the big decisions that alter the course of history get made. It's for some personal reason. For profit. For power. Or, in this case, to satisfy his girlfriend."
5:26 Chris Hedges: "And we should be clear that the Peloponnesian War snuffed out Athenian democracy.
5:32 Andrew Cockburn: "But the girl was happy."
Chris Hedges: "So, let's look at what's happening. Now, you had a wonderful line in the book somewhere about how, don't look at these wars as failures in Afghanistan, Iraq, or anywhere else. From the point of view of those who prosecute them, they're wildly successful. Explain why."
5:52 Andrew Cockburn: "Well, you have to think what the object of the exercise is. Is it to win the war. Was it to promote democracy in Afthanistan to liberate the women. That's what, of course, they told us. But the real reason was perfectly obvious. It was to make enormous sums of money. Which they duly did. Now we hear figures of a trillion dollars, two trillion dollars for the price of the war get tossed around. Just think about where that money went. Even today a trillion dollars is a lot of money. It's a wonderful amount of money to get for yourself.
I mean, we've seen in the last few days the heads of both Lockheed and Raytheon corporations lamenting that the end of the Afghan War is going to be a knock on their third quarter earnings. I think that in the case of Raytheon they're saying there's a cost. There's a cost to the end of the war. 75 million dollars it's costing them. Lockheed, I believe, even more. It's how they think about these."
6:52 "I mean, I tell a story elsewhere in the book about during the Korean War, half the casualties in the first winter of the war on the American side was frostbite. Why? Because no one had bothered to give them adequate boots because all the money was going on super expensive jet nuclear bombers which they didn't really need. But they were very expensive made people a lot of money. The boot makers really didn't compete as a lobby. So they were having to raid enemy trenches to steal their boots. How ridiculous.
Chris Hedges: "Well, you also make this point in Iraq that at a time when people lacked body armor and the humvees weren't armored, all of this money was going into this high-tech equipment that was useless. And the A-10 -- do I have that correct? -- the ground support plane which was actually quite effective, because it wasn't highly sophisticated and highly expensive was pushed aside. I mean, you can explain how what happened in Korea has just been replicated in the middle east."
7:57 Andrew Cockburn: Again. Yeah. How shocking and disgraceful it is, as you say, Chris, that the working-class families in this country who had sons and daughters in the military, in Iraq, in danger, and they were going into debt to get them body armor and night vision goggles and absolutely basic equipment which the high command couldn't be bothered to get them because, hey, there wasn't enough money in that. And they much prefer to spend money on like the system you mentioned earlier. You know, the hundred thousand dollar, you know, ground penetrating radar thing which the Army's own assessment said: No effective performance. You know, completely ineffective."
8:48 Chris Hedges: "Let's talk about an aircraft that was effective. Is it the A-10 ground-support aircraft? Because it wasn't expensive, there was a huge shortage of it, even though it was the most effective air support for troops on the ground."
Andrew Cockburn: "Right. I mean, the history is very interesting. It's the story of the A-10 which really tells the whole story in a way. The time when they invented the modern defense system in 1948 in a meeting called something like the Key West Accords where the services got to gether and divvied up the missions. And the Air Force got the close support mission, supporting troops on the ground from the air. They didn't care about troops on the ground at all. They'd gotten their independence by saying 'We can win wars. You don't need an army. We can just strike at the enemy's rear area with our long-range bombers and that wins the war.' Totally untrue, of course, but it got them independence and got them an enormous budget and enriched a huge aerospace industry. But they still had this mission."
"The Air Force in the mid early 70s, the Air Force was threatened by the Army, which was going to develop its own very expensive helicopter to do this mission. They couldn't have that. So they said, OK, well, we'll put together a ground support plane that will make the army go away, to kill that helicopter program. And as it so happened, the people they got to build that plane really did a fantastic job. You know, they actually cared about what can we do to make it a really effective instrument. So we can see, the pilots have great vision and can see exactly what's going on on the ground. It can fly low because it's heavily armored, and so on and so forth. And it was cheap, comparatively speaking."
"The Air Force hated it. Once they'd killed the Army helicopter program, they lost interest and have been trying to kill this plane ever since. Today, still, they're at it. Even though it's very effective. And I tell a couple of stories in the book about how this, in one case, resulted directly in the loss of five American soldiers, and the other, an Afghan family got wiped out for no reason except that an A-10 pilot, or two of them said -- they were sent to bomb a target which was a framhouse -- this is a bad target. This is just an ordinary family. And so they refused to kill this family. A high-tech 300 million dollar B-1 bomber miles up above who couldn't even see the ground, let alone see what the target was, said 'We'll take the job.' Pressed a button and blew apart a family. One small massacre among hundreds of thousands. But, you know, it was an example of the system." [emphasis added]